Quite apart from brands and price points, I'd advise you to at least look into the possibility of monoblock power amps. I used conventional stereo amps for decades, some very good ones included, but after trying a couple kinds of monoblocks I'll never use anything else. My speaker cable length came down from 7' to 18", and the improvement was enormous! I'm now using a pair of Pass Aleph 3's, which gets about $2000 at used prices, but cheaper monoblocks can be had.
