Please help with speaker guidance

Well, even though they will be for all round use, music, games and movies i think as kei said the sound should stay prety flat which i guess is down to speakers no sound card/amp?
Ive had a look around and wondered what you guys thought to any of these:
-Marantz Pm5004 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/MARANTZ-PM5...1S6C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350921925&sr=8-1)
-Denon PMA520AE (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Denon-PMA52...OBAQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350922175&sr=8-1)
-Pioneer A109 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-A-109-40w-Amplifier-Black/dp/B00005OOJF)
-Pioneer A10K (http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-10-K-Ster...2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1350920720&sr=1-2)

Price wise there all similar, what do you guys recommend any advice you've got is great.
Im also finding it hard to find second hands of these
 
Have you got speakers sorted to go with the amps?
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Unfortunatley not, im just starting to get into sorting out some kind of music system that i can upgrade over time, and as good as those speakers look, because they have the amp built in it takes away upgradability and flexibility. If in the future i wanted to upgrade speakers i would have still have to pay for an amp and visa versa. Im also given to understand that speakers with amps built in can lack in quality due to paying for the built in amp in the cost of the speakers. How come you dislike the 0404, ive not experienced any trouble with it?
 
The amp is matched to the speakers as they are designed for music creation so the perfect marriage really.

If you buy a cheap amp just now you'll probably buy some cheap speakers so when you upgrade the speakers in future the amp will still be cheap ... swings and roundabouts.

I upgraded from a MARANTZ PM4200 plus some Pioneer speakers to the current setup and love it. Got the old amp sitting in the cupboard gathering dust at the moment if you were interested in going down that route.

I dislike the 0404 due to the non existant stability on Windows 7 64bit. Creative have not made a proper driver for it and only a beta exists for Vista which needed to be shoehorned into 7.

Sound just dies every so often and I have to unplug and replug it in plus loads of other oddities.

Shame as its got all the functions and controls I want and need.
 
If you buy a cheap amp just now you'll probably buy some cheap speakers so when you upgrade the speakers in future the amp will still be cheap ... swings and roundabouts.
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Hmm I understand what you mean, so your vote is save buying an amp and jump straight to quality active speakers? Aghh its so confusing, I'm basically just after accurate sound reproduction and good quality rich sounds. Not sure which is the best route to take. I have this problem with monitors in not forward planning how I want my desktop setup and end up with monitors that don't match my needs. /confusion
 
How big is your room, how loud do you play your music. If u like I can take pic of my setup for you
 
With your budget, i'd be looking at the second hand market. Cheap doesn't necessarily equate to crap. My system was rescued from the skip (sometimes people really don't have a clue what they own), given a service and some tweaks and now outperforms all the amps i own. My speakers were originally vintage goodmans "The Minister" which i completely rebuilt into Kef chorales. In total i spent roughly your budget on upgrading free equipment, end result i'd say it was more than worth it.

You are right that active monitors, however good they are, cannot be upgraded, merely replaced. Most also lack decent connectivity. Personally, they are a big compromise as the amplifier takes up space inside the cabinet that could be used to improve the LF response. (cabinet volume along with driver size/displacement is what gives you extended low frequency response) It also means that the manufacturer will have tried to make the amp as small as possible. An amplifier is all about the power supply, poor psu, poor amp, simple as. Those rokkits may sound quite good, but you'll never know if they could be improved merely by taking out the built in amps and connecting them to a proper amplifier. All the speakers in work are harbeth monitor 30's connected to 2U harrison amps. I think the only pair that i believe might be integrated monitors are genelecs.
 
How big is your room, how loud do you play your music. If u like I can take pic of my setup for you
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Not huge, 14 ft by 12, maybe a tad smaller. Volume wise some days i have it quite low just for general listening but then on weekend i have it sort of blaring, lol, but thats full on my old 5w each speakers, so guess thats not too loud - its definitley not loud enough.
I noticed listening to some old speakers and amp that the tone was very hollow and 'small' sounding, until the volume was turned up. By this i dont mean sounded quiet just wern't being 'driven'. I wondered if the 'loudness' button on the amps i linked would correct for this (the old one didnt have it). So when im listening to music quietly i still get the bass and highs with some impact. (hope that makes sense)
With your budget, i'd be looking at the second hand market. Cheap doesn't necessarily equate to crap.
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So if i get on NO COMPETITOR MENTIONING! and have a look for some cheapie second hand ones could you give some guidance as to whats good, because apart from wattage all i've got to go on is looks, and as you said the old cheap looking ones may not be rubbish. Just feel like im entering a bit of minefield
 
Kei said:
With your budget, i'd be looking at the second hand market. Cheap doesn't necessarily equate to crap. My system was rescued from the skip (sometimes people really don't have a clue what they own), given a service and some tweaks and now outperforms all the amps i own. My speakers were originally vintage goodmans "The Minister" which i completely rebuilt into Kef chorales. In total i spent roughly your budget on upgrading free equipment, end result i'd say it was more than worth it.

You are right that active monitors, however good they are, cannot be upgraded, merely replaced. Most also lack decent connectivity. Personally, they are a big compromise as the amplifier takes up space inside the cabinet that could be used to improve the LF response. (cabinet volume along with driver size/displacement is what gives you extended low frequency response) It also means that the manufacturer will have tried to make the amp as small as possible. An amplifier is all about the power supply, poor psu, poor amp, simple as. Those rokkits may sound quite good, but you'll never know if they could be improved merely by taking out the built in amps and connecting them to a proper amplifier. All the speakers in work are harbeth monitor 30's connected to 2U harrison amps. I think the only pair that i believe might be integrated monitors are genelecs.
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You obviously know your stuff whereas Im a mere mortal but I dont think that KRK (Gibson), Adam, Yamaha and Mackie etc would release products into the lower end of the market that had issues and from reading up on things before buying I learned that the current state of the art in active monitors is miles ahead of previous generations and that by having control of the speaker unit and the driving amp leads to a perfect balance whereas there can be a mismatch using one brand of amp on another brand of speaker as in home hifi.

One avenue is to buy a set of active monitors and play with them for a week and if you dont like em send em back to the supplier under 7 days DSR.

Here's the pics of mine, not an idea setup space wise but it works and actually sounds pretty good due to the angle on the tweeters towards my head when sitting.

1GF9k.jpg
 
Certainly can try to help where possible. Only point i will make though is that unless you are electrically savvy and can solder, really old kit is out as it'll need servicing to get the best from it. By old i'd say pre 1992 roughly, but it'd depend on things like the quality of components used and how hot the unit has been running.

Loudness is merely a boost of 6-12dB at 60-100Hz. This is usually linked to a centre tapping on old style volume controls (actual potentiometer based rather than digital rotary encoder) This means that the loudness effect reduces as the volume is turned up. (once you pass a certain point it will have no effect.

Best advice i can give you at this point is to go to your local hifi dealer that has an audition room and listen to a few different amps / speakers and find brands that you like the sound of. Most brands will have a sonic signature and there is a certain degree of harmony between the speakers and the amp. (symbiosis) For example, my kef speakers don't work too well with my dad's leak amp, yet the amp works exceptionally well with the celestion speakers he has. My luxman amp is fine driving either, even both at the same time in parallel across the outputs.

I don't see how they can squeeze a decent class A/B amp into something so small and still leave adequate volume for the speaker to operate in. They are quite sketchy on the amplifier details in the spec list merely quoting 30W for the woofer and 15W for the tweeter. Are they saying that the crossover is active and there are in fact two separate amps with their own power supplies? There are no distortion figures for quoted power nor do they state whether the quoted power is RMS or peak. Maybe i'm too much of a sceptic, but i like details and lots of it. Heck back in the old days they used to plot amplifier characteristics graphically was far simpler to understand vs a bombardment of numbers and various quoting methods. (Din, IHF-A, EISA etc and so forth)

For example this is the inside of my amp which produces 50W per channel. The main power supply reservoir caps are nearly as big as the amp module in those rokits. In any case, with problems like this and this, it's obvious they aren't exactly using the best capacitors. (i mean at least mine had the decency to last over 30 years before showing signs of deterioration) As far as i can tell the main reservoir caps for the power supply are a pair of 2200uF which i'd consider very lean minimum i'd want at the quoted power level is 6800uF and i'd prefer 10,000uF. Mine has 15,000uF per channel, the leak (35Wpc has 10k and the quad 50Wpc has 18.8k).
L-220_amp.jpg
 
Youve gone off on an electronics rampage there with stuff thats way over my head (I did was I was a mortal).

I suppose it all depends what the op wants out of it all.

I bought my gear as I do a lot of video editing plus music production and wanted a good system that wasnt going to break the bank that was ideally suited to the small room I have.

I bought Sound on Sound magazine and the special editions on monitors and studio space. I read all the reviews on everything from the uber cheap M-Audio (which really DO have problems) through to the ribbon tweeter Adams and so on.

The KRKs got a good write up from real world testing by the author of the article not just from marketing bumf and Ive seen them used in different studios across the world so thats why I went with them. I am very happy and yes it is mind boggling how a small frame can deliver such potent output but there you have it.

My previous gear list included a NAD 310 amplifier than kept blow caps about 15 years ago. I picked it up in 1993/4 I believe and thought it was great till then.

Funnily enough my cassette deck is an HX Pro equipped Luxman K322 which has been sitting in the same cupboard as the Marantz CD63 SE and PM4200 amp for a few years now too.
 
It is probably just me, i am particularly fussy and like to know the ins and outs of everything. I probably know too much which now makes me doubt almost everything electronic you can buy these days as it simply isn't as well made as it used to be. (mainly down to poor quality components rather than poor manufacturing practice) Speakers aren't much of a problem as most are still well made, though i wish they'd offer some larger sized units.

As for amplifier suggestions, there is a marantz pm7000 finishing today on the bay that's still quite cheap and a pm-66 se finishing in 3 days. There's a very nice teac a-h500i finishing in 2 days, although i have my doubts about that one staying cheap as it looks lovely. There are a few cambridge audio A5's which are fairly good. I'll keep an eye open for more.
 
Thanks for this pics and advice guys, Thats setup looks amazing, the speakers look a lot bigger than they do in pictures.
Had another look:
Denon PMA-255UK http://www.preloved.co.uk/adverts/s...5uk-special-edition-integrated-amplifier.html
Marantz pm4000 http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/marantz-integrated-amplifier-pm4000/1001813086
Marantz pm7200 http://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/marantz-pm7200-phono-integrated-amplifier/111459390
Denon pma 355UK http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DENON-PMA..._HomeAudioHiFi_Amplifiers&hash=item484ae58440
Pioneer A400 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PIONEER-A..._HomeAudioHiFi_Amplifiers&hash=item3378330ffd
Pioneer a109 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Pioneer-A..._HomeAudioHiFi_Amplifiers&hash=item27cbf3269d

Found some cheap A5s too: http://www.gumtree.com/search?q=cam...nited+Kingdom&category=all&search_scope=title
 
Out of those, the marantz pm7200 and pioneer a-400 are probably the best. The price on that pioneer is well high though, you should be able to get one for a lot less than that. Here are a few that i found. The cambridge audio A5 is a fair amp for the money but i'd place it bottom of the pack of these. Certainly a good bargain but not a spectacular amp if you go by what others say about it.

Marantz PM7000
Audiolab 8000A
Luxman L-1 - Might be a tad old, but i have a huge liking for luxman amplifiers.
Various different cambridge audio A5's 1 2 3

These are just a few examples for you.
 
Cheers for looking, im guessing the 7000 and 7200 are similar? Part of the problem with ebay is bidding wars, and if you dont wind you have to look for a compromise, prefer buy it nows, maybe thats just me.
Yeah looking into it further and seeing what people say the A5 dosn't look fantastic, would prefer to pay a bit more and get something better. Wow the audiolab one is uber retro!
How do the older ones (pm7000, 7200 and a-400) compare to some of the newer ones (Pioneer a109, a10k, denon pma520ae and marantz pm5004). I know there newer so difficult to find second but just thought due to their new-ness might perform just as well if not better than the older ones that people rave about (especially the a-400 and 7000). If they perform similarly i would prefer to fork out and extra £50 for something more modern and new. Not enjoying the lack of this 'louder' button on the old models for some reason heh
 
I wouldn't say discrete class a/b amplifier technology has moved on a great deal over the last 30 years. If anything, the older stuff is actually better made using better parts. The advances in technology have been in class d and IC bases amps. Btw, I am surprised about the loudness as it was a very common feature on vintage amplifiers. I'd have expected it to be more difficult to find one that didn't have it.

Of the amps I've listed, I like the audiolab and luxman the most. Ill admit to having a predisposition towards the luxman due to me having one myself. I'd also have suggested a quad but they aren't viable due to the cost involved. (Only amp I've heard to give my luxman a run for its money)
 
hehe think i would have to hide the vintage ones under my bed would stick out like a sore thumb with my setup. Will keep my eyes peeled for the ones you recommended from your list and the ones you suggested from my list. Gonna head down to richer sounds tomorrow because, as you said, i think i really need to hear some of these amps.
 
etherd said:
Well, even though they will be for all round use, music, games and movies i think as kei said the sound should stay prety flat which i guess is down to speakers no sound card/amp?
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A bit confused by this. If you want the sound to stay pretty flat then you won't get it with the hi-fi bookshelf speakers you are considering. I haven't heard the Rokits but they are a better recommendation for your needs.
 
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