Alan,
Thanks a lot for your comment. I feel that, with all the wonderfully smart people around, my audio education is in very good hands here.
As a sidenote on the Yahama RX-V1400, from my research I think a great deal of the innards have been overhauled for quality's sake compared to their earlier receivers:
To quote http://www.yamaha.com/yec/products/RECEIVER/RXV1400_lit.PDF (Basically a feature overview):
"Finest parts used throughout for high sound quality" (through deconstruction perhaps implying this was not always the case but is now)
"High Current Amplification Achieves Low Impedance/High Current Power from Input to Output" ...
"Yamaha receivers have always had fairly high current levels (ed: perhaps not), but with the RX-V1400, we have further improved this performance"
"Finest Parts Used Throughout ... Yamaha technicians completely re-evaluated all the parts used in previous receivers. As a result, many were replaced with more expensive or custom-designed units." (It goes on to detail the capacitors and transformer used)
Hopefully Yamaha is playing it straight and this is a new beast, much more capable of driving low-impedance speakers.
Best,
Mike
