Single ended = large images?

4 ft violin, 12 ft wide piano etc.

I’ve always thought that with most recordings with a piano in them, the piano usually sounds nearly as long as the small room I am set up in . . . but it’s been so long since I’ve been to live music (with or without piano). . . .

Not that this applies to you and your equipment, but I remember back in the early summer of ’01 when I got my present amp (Cary V12) I was set up in a bigger room and I was frequently operating within ear-bleed parameters. I remember one early afternoon when I was the only one in the house and I had the Steve Earle/I Feel Alright CD on, and I just kept tweaking it louder and louder and louder . . . I remember describing it to a friend of mine at work, I told him it was like the picture was blowing up bigger and bigger like a balloon! I thought that the speakers might explode! Anyway, I found the experience to be a lot of good clean sonic fun, and I rather enjoyed it.

Hmmm.  You only want to spend $7K on a new amp, but you have $$$$$ worth of REL subs in your system.  What am I missing?

Check into Audio Mirror SET 45w  monoblocks. You can get ‘em used. Two 6C33C wired in parallel in each mono bloc. Vlad is great to work with. These may be what you are looking for.

I will check into Audio Mirror. Thanks.

Regarding imaging, the other thing worth mentioning is the recording. Certainly there are recordings that are close mic'd  pianos, for example, and therefore the piano will sound giant even if  it's perfectly reproduced. But I just don't want images to be much larger than they would sound with a normal push pull amplifier, which I find fools my brain into thinking it's a real instrument and real space. As one of you pointed out this may be partly due to what each of us gets accustomed to over time. So it could be just my preference. 

Regarding how much money I want to spend, I bought my REL subs used and have about $12,000 invested in the subs and cables. One of the best upgrades I ever made, and not just for bass. They make everything sound so much more real and more analogue. It's not easy to understand exactly why that is, but it is. $7,000 on a used amplifier probably equates to a $15,000 retail, so I don't know why that seems so odd. Also I don't know that it's always meaningful to calibrate how much money you put into each component, especially at this level. Just picking the right component is more important. And of course affordability comes into play. My Quicksilver amps were $6,500 new and I bought them for $3,000 used. They are quite at home in a system of almost any level. 

@montaldo Completely slipped my mind, but in thinking about that much Rel sub power it came to me that one very important aspect of Rel subs is how they affect sound staging and imaging. I have only two of the T9x, adding these brought an easily noticeable expansion in sound stage and image size. I can only imagine how your stack of subs would far more greatly expand upon what I'm hearing. My room similar size to yours, I presume your stack with my 300B SET monoblocks would completely overwhelm my room.