Sonus Faber Il Cremonese Amp Pairing suggestions

I’m interested to hear if you think the STR would be a "laughable" pairing for the Il Cremonese?

No, not at all (for now anyway — read on). In fact, as you’re already familiar with the the sound of the Anthem gear I’d highly recommend you continue to use it with the new speakers for a couple months and let your ears/brain settle in to the new sound. You probably know this, but if the speakers are new you should wait at least 200 hours of playing time before making any firm conclusions. Now, after the speakers are broken in and you feel confident you know the sound as it exists, identify which areas you’d like to improve upon and then do research to find equipment that has strengths in those areas. Moving too fast and trying to choose any equipment now is at least a waste of time and worse you could end up with a combo of gear that doesn’t ultimately synergize to your tastes/liking. That’s why you need to set a firm baseline with the Anthem gear and then determine the direction you want/need to go. BTW, when you’re listening in 2-channel do NOT employ the Anthem room correction because your new stereo preamp or integrated stereo amp won’t have it and you need a pure apples-to-apples comparison here.

As you alluded to, with speakers at this level you’ll want a separate DAC, stereo preamp and amp (yes you are going to replace the STR), or a kick-ass integrated amp. Obviously you’ll keep the AVM90 for HT duties and run its front L/R preouts to the stereo pre or integrated so there’s that. Once you’ve acclimated to the new speakers and determine what direction you want to go sonically start looking/researching for the components above that go in that direction. By all means do not rush this process or you could very well make some potentially bad — and very expensive — decisions you may really regret. Take your time, enjoy the process/search, and get it right. It’ll pay off huge in the long run, and these speakers deserve the effort.

BTW, why the II Cremonese? Have you heard them? There are many phenomenal speakers in that price range from the likes of Magico, Wilson, Rockport, Joseph Audio, Vandersteen, Usher, Raidho, etc. out there and are well worth auditioning just for perspective if nothing else if you haven’t already. Anyway, just my $0.02 FWIW.

Just a thought off the top. Your first concern for an amp should be if it offers the sound characteristics you’re looking for because if not what’s the point and then concern yourself with power.  The Cremonese’s sensitivity is a relatively high 92dB with a nominal impedance of 4 Ohms. What this tells me is that even more than higher Wpc you should pay attention to an amp’s power supply. With a nominal impedance of 4 Ohms it’s reasonable to assume it drops below that in at least one if not two points over the frequency range, so you need an amp that has the power reserves to handle those dips. With their high sensitivity I kinda doubt you’d need much more than 200Wpc if that amp can double into 4 Ohms and close to double again into 2 Ohms. Bottom line is you don’t necessarily need huge Wpc to make the Cremonese sing in full voice.

That said, do not ignore the importance of the preamp that is often at least as important as an amp, and in many cases, like mine, the preamp can have significantly more influence on a system’s performance than an amp. Balance in a system is critical, so your amp and preamp should be on the same level performance wise or one could easily become a bottleneck. Likewise the DAC should be at a similar performance level as the pre and amp, and personally I wouldn’t attack cables until I had these other pieces in place, but eventually they’ll be important to address too and need to synergize with everything else. Again, FWIW.