Krell 400xi vs. BAT VK-300x vs. McIntosh MA6900

Mcintosh is high end...if you live in the 60's! I owned it and sold it...very old school sound, unless you like haze and lack of tone color..a reciever would sound better! I've owned the 400xi in several of my systems and it never sounded anything less than spectacular, depending on the cabling and front end/speaker combo. In fact i sold my evo stuff because it didn't live up to the sound of the integrated! Wilson uses ARC and Krell for voicing by the way...not Mcintosh!!

The krell 400xi is killer good when broken in and cabled properly...mate it to a 6-8ohm speaker of musical heritage and it don't much better at any price, including my former $40K evo rig!! Mcintosh' just doesn't get out of the way of the music...it inflicts a significant signature over the sound. A signature that is not anywhere near state of the art! Martin Colloms would tend to agree since he pulls no punches either. My Mcintosh 501's and C46 were very old school sound...the tube pre was even worse. The parts from the 1960's for heavens sake..anyway, enjoy!!

I now have the 400xi hooked up to a Musical Fidelity A5 tube CD player and Krell Resolution 2 speakers. My interconnect and speaker cables are MIT Oracle V2.1, my power cords are Transparent powerlink MM. Very dynamic and lifelike sound..neutral but engaging with great extension. Compared to my previous Evo rig the highs are so much better..sweet, clear and smooth with tremendous sparkle and no dryness or harshness. I predict a re-tooling of the krell evo amp's in the near future..maybe even the preamps as well..something is wrong with the new house sound and I think it's the fact that they are not class A anymore!!