Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners General Help, Suggestions, Advice, Discussion

The sad side to Wattage in relation to speakers is that it's not all equal. Ohms law says that W = V * A. So on many of the lower end systems they can juice up the Voltage and get away with close to no Amps to give a very nice Watt's number. Will the speakers work well? No.

I have an Anthem MCA5 that tips the scales at 57lbs and does a reasonable job at powering my speakers. (150w x 5 channels) and all it does it amplify. Your Denon tips the scales at 40lbs and says it can do 130w x 7 channels and has all the other DAC's and components inside. Something doesn't balance out here?

Your question however is what does it need to drive these speakers well? I'd say about 45w of true clean power each channel. The challenge however is to figure out who is selling you smoke, and who is actually delivering you the real thing.

I was shown that numbers don't matter when I first got into audio and went to the big audio shop in Toronto, and they had a 30w Cambridge Audio receiver setup beside a 200w Sony. The Cambridge sounded way better and actually felt louder than the Sony. It also weighed 3 times as much.

You really need to look into the actual spec's of anything that you buy. What is the size of the main capacitor? How much headroom does it have? What is the current pull on the unit?

Now your receiver does at least have Pre-Out's so you can hook up an external amp to the unit. If I were you, I'd skip trying to buy new as your just paying upfront for the depreciation for the next person who owns it. I'd look as to what is availible on the used market at http://www.usaudiomart.com/ and save yourself some coin in the process.