Matching components. Rotel & Audible Illusions.

A comment on the CD player purchase. The best advise that I could give you is to bring CD's that you are very familiar with to an audio salon that carries your equipment or to work with an audio salon that will allow you to audition the component at your place. There are so many great CD players around at all price points that it should not be hard to find a few that will meet your listening expectations and your financial constraints.

Read all of the reviews that you can about the components and assume that the component is not as good as the great reports and not as bad as the negative ones. Trust your ears. The only opinion that matters is yours. Good Luck.

I have heard the AI/Rotel combination (different model amp, but same company) and it sounds very good together; a very synergistic match. I'll leave it to the more technically inclined to tell me if I got this right, but my recollection is you'd like a high output impedance from the pre and a low input impedance on the amp, and that is usually the way it works between tubed preamps and solid-state amps. Maybe that's why a lot of us on this site like tubed preamps into solid state. I'll leave the CD player discussion to others, although you should give us an idea of your listening biases and preferences and the price range you'd like to buy, then check the archives, as there are a lot of CDP threads. You can get a lot of quality these days without spending a bundle.