Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater need help

im new to the boards and i need a little direction from the more experienced. years ago (maybe 25 or so) i was very into high end audio, i was young lived at home, had a good paying job and could afford nice things. threw the early years i accuired some nice sounding equipment and had what i thought to be one of the best sounding systems around (at least in my neck of the woods) i started out with the likes of phase liner amps and preamp these turned out to be a fire waitng to catch. i burned up 2 of these in just a few months. 1 400 and 1 750 so i started to save money etc. and step up. i then found a p300 accuphase amp(ahh i was in love) these amps were incredible at the time the very best money could buy. i eventully purchesed another 300 and a p 1000. all from accuphase. i had a nice heathkit preamp a teac reel to reel (old school) sony cassete deck sony cd player 2 sets of 104.7 kef speakers and one set of old kilpch "voice of theater". fast foward a few years. the divorce..... the ex gets the speakers the preamp, and cassete deck. so i still have the amps 2 300s and a 1000 cd player, etc. im wanting to put this monster back togther. i need a new preamp, and a new set of speakers. i mainley want to listen to music, but i now have a nice high def. tv and a decent dvd. player so i wouldnt mind having some sort of surround set up. again the primary focus is music. im am intrested in the axiom speaker system. im not above spending 4 to 5k on a nice speaker set up. however i dont want to spen that much on a preamp. i need suggestions on a good preamp that will run three amps and achieve what im looking for. also suggestions on some of the axiom speakers etc.

I own Rotel with my Axioms, and of course I would suggest a Rotel as a pre-amp. RSP-1098, costs around 3K and had great reviews. Never owned one though.

i want to keep the price of the pre amp modest if i can. i would rather spend the bigger money on the speakers..

Strick, welcome. There wouldn't appear to be a good reason to spend money on a high-priced separate preamp in your case. Get a receiver with a good set of features and use the preouts to drive your three present amps, then use some of the amp channels in the receiver to drive surround speakers, which you really should have even for music. Using processing such as DPLII, Logic 7 or Neo:6 allows you to extract the ambient material present to varying degrees in even two channel source material and send it to the surrounds where it belongs. Among others, the HK 435(around $500), or Yamaha 1600(around $700)would be good for this use.

As to the speakers, depending on the size of your room, a setup based on M60 or M80 mains with QS8 surrounds and a EP500 or EP600 sub would be excellent.

I recently started getting educated in to the latest stuff via this site audioholics.com. They have a lot of reviews of the latest receivers.

One receiver that is getting a lot of attention is the Yamaha 2600. Extremely feature rich without braking the bank.

I too wanted most my money going to the speakers and ended up going with Yamaha 2500 receiver. Since the 2600 is the latest and greatest I was able to find the 2500 for $604 shiping and all. It also has a ton of features I was looking for and has all the power and flexibility I need (130watts X 7). I wasn't looking to get a 4ohm speaker set (M80) though which is my major limitation with the Yamaha 2500. M60s I'm told are already overkill for my very average room size.

I'm going overkill on my sub though with the EP500 I don't care what anyone says.

One thing I have found is just how much more receiver (especially features)you can get money wise compared to the old days. I was very surprised.

this is the info. i was looking for.. thanks. like i said im abiut 15 years behind on the technology. years ago you couldnt get a intergrated amp with pre outs. with your suggestions i will have the best of both worlds. home theater as well as music.

I agree with John and KC. I'd defiantly go with a good receiver to use as your processor. Find one that as all the features you like, want and need, and simply use the preouts to hook up your amps. That's what I did and couldn't be more pleased. Good luck and keep us posted.



Sutter