Originally Posted By: alan
There's also an historical tradition that component parts chosen for pre-pros and separate amplifiers are of better quality--better output devices, more sophisitcated DACs, better shielding and so on.



Yes, and while nobody is here to say that's ALWAYS the case, generally speaking it should be. A reciever (most anyway) is a series of trade-off's. If you have a $1500 dollar reciever sitting next to a $1500 dollar amplifier, you would expect the amplifier to be of much better quality than the one in the reciever. You must also consider heat. A big amplifier (A/B class, the most common) creates a LOT of heat. So they can't stuff a very big amp inside of a power reciever or they would fry the processor.

Same should be the case for a separate processor. If you have a $1500 dollar processor sitting next to the $1500 dollar reciever, then you would expect the parts in the processor to be of much higher value than those being used in the reciever.

(some companies may sell you a $750 dollar processor for $1500 bucks, based on that assumption alone. But their reputation for doing so should catch up to them sooner or later)

My Stuff :

M80's
QS8's
VP150
EP800
Denon 4802
Emotiva XPA-3
Samsung BD-P3600
Sharp 65 Inch Aquos LCD