New Amp needed :)

jetpaczx

jetpaczx

jetpaczx

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Joined
7 Oct 2014
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380
I currently have a NAD 320BEE amp which is in great working order but due to an oversight (Idiot), It does not have a Phono Stage, having bought myself a nice Rega Planar 3 I am left with low volume as you can guess.

So I am searching for a new amp rather than a Phono Stage based on my desk space is at a premium.

I have narrowed my picks to the following (Budget is about £250)

Marantz PM6006 Stereo Integrated Amplifier (New) or
Cambridge Audio TOPAZ SR10 (New) or
Sony TA-FB940R (Second Hand)

Any advice gratefully received.
 
Just place phono stage out of the way. Doesn't make sense to sell nad buying another amp when little box is solution.

Can't be too small desk as you have full size gear and record deck.
 
All three of your picks have remote control. Do you particularly need remote control if this is a desktop system? I ask because if you're open to s/h and IR remote isn't a deal breaker then there's one very obvious choice mission from the list; a Rega Brio.

Brio has been around in various forms since the first model launched in 1991. It's a cracking amp in all its various guises. Given that Rega made your TT, and they do excellent phono stages, one of the stand-out features of the Rega amps is the very high quality built-in phono stage.

Brio-R is the latest version. That's well out of your price range even s/h. Brio-3's turn up on Ebay for around the £150 mark. That's great value for any good British Hi-Fi amp, but it's astonishing when you consider the quality of the Brio line. Brios are lush, warm, involving, rhythmic amps that work equally well with TT, CD or streamed sources.

If you definitely need IR remote for some reason then I'd reconsider the CA Topaz. I like CA as a brand, and I think they do some cracking product, but this isn't one of them. It's a receiver, and I think it suffers as a result sonically because some much needed budget is diverted away from making a decent little budget amp to making an amp that includes a radio tuner. Second, the additional switching circuits for the tuner can pollute the audio trail for the line inputs. If you're going to go CA then maybe the AM10 if the pennies are really tight. Personally though it would be the Onkyo 9010 instead of the CA Topaz SR.
 
That's fair enough re the extra speakers. I have to say though that bi-wire is a waste of time and money. Great for the people who make and sell speaker wire because you buy two lots of it, but the way it changes the sound by making the driver crossover-point blend less-well kind of robs decent speakers of timing and cohesiveness. Makes me smile too how bi-wire and buy wire sound the same ;)

Passive bi-amping (which I'm guessing you really meant) can work well for AV receivers with decent speakers. That's because good AV receivers change the drive characteristics of the HF and LF channels to better suit the typical requirements of the tweeter and bass drivers. The thing with passive bi-amping though is that the speaker crossover is still in place although now separated in to HF and LF circuits. This means that most of the benefits heard in passive bi-amping come from the increase in power being delivered to the speaker rather than from separating the HF and LF channels. Still, it's a gain, and so long as the Hi-Fi amp has sufficient current reserve to drive double the number of channels without too much of a sacrifice in power delivery over a single set of speaker outs then it's an interesting experiment.

Active bi-amping is the gold standard of course. That's where the crossover is taken out of the speakers and sits as a separate circuit between the pre-amp and the power amps. In this configuration power amp outputs are wired directly across the driver terminals. That's something pretty high-end though and not achievable with a typical integrated stereo amp.
 
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