PS -- Enjoyed the discussion on separates vs. receivers as well.
Casey - thanks for the thoughts & it seems like you picked up a great sounding unit.
Serenity - will look forward to reading your thoughts on this question after your tests.
TAM - cynical or not, the opinion is reasonable and balanced and experience-based, as usual.
It does seem from prior posts that you do still place a tangible value on having large dynamic reserves of clean power. This seems pretty non-controversial, despite common assertions (any or all of which you may simultaneously agree with) that i) amplifiers will generally sound similar when operating inside their limits, ii) many real uses (esp. with efficient speakers) employ much less power than most people generally guess, and iii) appreciable volume increases require huge (not just incremental) gains in power, due to our logarithmic hearing response (as John emphasized). So, although more power is a very typical (and maybe one of the biggest) real world benefits of separates, I'll distinguish it (as did Casey) from the "separate" question of intrinsic signal quality.
There's no doubt that more sophisticated analog circuits are being employed in certain high end separates (an interesting, if somewhat obscure, comparative parts breakdown example is available
here ). But how audible is the resulting difference in a typical setup? Likewise, I'm "not really sure". I don't discount it, but rather have no firsthand experience to base an opinion on, and reliable people say different things. Balanced outputs, as are very common on separates, are an elegant solution to cabling noise, and there is real physics & engineering to justify the usage, especially for long runs ... but extent and contextual scope of the audible benefit is again outside my experience. If nothing else, the division of essentially reducible functions always seems favorable to me just on the grounds of basic principle, and there is certainly no intrinsic link expected between the rates at which digital signal processing feature sets and power amplifiers become either technologically obsolete or worn out.
Regardless, and setting aside all of those hypotheticals, I am looking forward quite a bit at the moment to the reality of a new receiver, which I very much suspect will sound really great!
