Soul, welcome. It's highly doubtful in most cases that a "better amp" will provide an audibly significant upgrade. The transient performance you mention is determined by the program material, the speakers and the room acoustics. Any competently designed amplifying device has to have sufficient transient response capability to handle the "fastest" frequencies of interest at the maximum output level.
You don't mention the max output of your present receiver, but the "distortion performance" is inaudibly low at that level, quite possibly less than the speaker or program material distortion. If you actually are playing at extremely high levels creating a possibility of permanent hearing damage, then amplifier distortion on peaks can be a factor. An amplifier with a far higher maximum output(at least 300 watts)is one remedy, but a more prudent one is to turn the volume down a dB or two.
At this point, without knowing more about your present receiver, the suggestion for replacing the Yamaha would be one of the Denon or Onkyo models with the top Audyssey MultEQ XT-32 auto calibration and room equalization.
As to other possible upgrades, you haven't mentioned what your other speakers and sub are, and this might be an area for significant improvement.
Thank you John K. Let me give you a little more info on what I want to accomplish and what I have.
Right now I have a Yamaha HTR-5990, middle of the road receiver (roughly 80wpc). Also I have a HP Media Smart extender. I am a music listener and though I have a surround receiver I do 90% music and 10% movies. Also I am probably 50% spotify and 50% uncompressed wav in terms of my sources.
The Mediasmart feeds my Samsung LCD via HDMI and I feed my receiver via Lightpipe (digital optical). My living room is not that large and I followed the Axiom recommendation of placing my speakers 5' from the side walls and 9" from the rear. I also keep them tilted in 10% or so to align the tweeter with my listening position 6-8' away.
I like the Axioms in that I find them to be smooth and not overly harsh(like to B&W's I had). However as a trained audio engineer I am very sensitive to low levels of distortion, unlike what you would find with a amp that is clipping. It's more like the signal is being choked off and can not fully "breath" like you would find in a live sound situation. That is what I want to reproduce as that is the way I'm accustomed to hearing music. You are correct that it's likely the room that's causing most of the lack of transients and I didn't think about that.
I don't want to buy super high end speaker because of the expense that goes into making them sound good (high end pre/pro, d/a converter/ amp/ cables etc). Not to mention that I'd have to spend over 10k on the speakers to get a significant bump in quality.
I'd rather get some decent speakers that can be optimized with high end amp's pre/pro's da's etc. as I can afford them. I want to piece my system together over the next few years step by step. But I'm looking for help to determine what units will be the best long term fits for me and how much of a performance increase I can get with the M60's and the right supplemental parts.
I hope this makes sense.......
