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February 20, 2008 - 9:27am
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Advice welcome
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So you no longer have the Macs and NAD?
What's your budget?
Dave
Hi, welcome!
I used to love those KEF 107's! You should still get fine sound out of them.
The C28 preamp, compared to newer pieces, is/was quite noisy, so I expect you'll find an apparent improvement with newer gear on that front.
With regard to your shopping agenda, do you know if you'd want an integrated amp, seperates, DVD capability, just CD, etc?
Toss us some more desires and we'll start chiming in.
I don't know who's still in the Sacto area, you may need to head into the Bay Area.
Have the NAD Mac now belongs to a different system. I can spend serious money, but I can't figure out why. Audiophile glowingly rates a Dennon A-5999 integrated amp for about $600-$700 and the local home theater audio guy thinks I should hve a Parasoundamp + preamp for $2800 and a separate audio store thinks maybe a $5K system is what I really want. How do I choose? If it makes a real difference I'll talk money.
I think I want to separate audio from home theater, being much choosier about music sound than movie sound. We have lousy antenna FM in the country here, s sounds would be primariy CDs and probably a Mac as a server for CDs I now own of continue to accumulate. We mostly listen to folk/bluegrass/classical. We have Dish TV so I want a capability of using that signal for background music . We want to stream audio ino this system from Itunes or Real Player, as well.
Have a look at the Olive Opus No 5. This box includes a very good CD player as well as uPnP A/V compliant media server and media player capabilities. The media player can stream content to and from your Mac while having a local server means that your Mac will not have to be on (or even connected) to enjoy music. It also can receive internet radio. I wouldn't invest too much in the size of the internal storage as it will connect to any external NAS that is uPnP compliant. As far as an amp, the Kef's are very efficient at 90dB/1W but only 4 ohms. A quality integrated would do fine but be sure that it handles low impedance loads smoothly. A quick perusal of recent reviews turned up the NAD Master Series M3 that looks to be a winner.