2. home-theater
  3. 1419964267

How good are recievers these days?

Hi Folks. I haven't been on here in years. I sort of fell out of the high end audio about 8-9 years ago. Need some advice

So long story short, i have a set of Magnepan MMGw's i use as my mains which replaced a damaged paif of Jmlab Chorus.. I had a Denon 3805 and planned to pick up an outboard amplifier to drive the speakers. A friend loaned me an amp which had serious issues and killed my Denon 3805, so my amp budget got raided to replace it with a used Denon 3806.

As it stands now, it does not sound horrible, but i now have a small budget for an amplifer. between 500-1000 and i had planned on getting something used.

I ran into an old friend when i was picking up a 4k LED TV this weekend who worked at Best Buy (i can already hear your eyes rolling) at thier magnolia center. He mentioned they did multimillion dollar installations, full high end audio, etc. Today i asked him if he had any recommendations for a good 2 channel amp that can handle a 4 ohm load.

His response suprised me, he recommended a Pioneer Elite SC-81 receiver.

He does this stuff for a living, I have been out of the audio hobby and not been paying attention for the better part of the last 10 years. This receiver sports the D3 digital amp, and it claims to be stable with a 4 ohm load.

How good are these digital amps? I remember Velodyne putting digital amps in thier subwoofers a long time ago, but i know nothing else about them. Can that actually push the Magnepan MMGw? or should i go back to looking at a second hand Parasound or even some Adcoms?

Thank you in advance!
slappy

Showing 1 response by paraneer

paraneer's avatar
paraneer
818 posts
 
I think it is the only way to get the
lossless sound off a blu-ray digitally. Also, no SACD
players output their signal digitally except on HDMI.

The future is DSP. Roomperfect, Dirac, just the beginning of
the future.

Sorry sport, initial Blu-ray players had 7.1 analog outputs
to obtain lossless sound into legacy, non HDMI equipment.
My friend still does this into his non HDMI Sunfire HT
system. Further, I happen to own an old Pioneer DVD player,
DV578A (in mothballs), that outputs 5.1 SACD via analog
outputs. In fact, you may not know this but SACD was out
long before HDMI.

But if you're actually talking about outputting the signal
from the player, digitally, then yes, I suppose you need
HDMI. So it can only converted to analog somewhere else
down the chain.

Better be careful or you'll date yourself as a newbie with a
digital agenda. Why I'll bet you also believe that all amps
sounds the same too. Have a good one pal.
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