Power Amp vs. HT Receiver.

[Juggy]

All,

I wanted to know if any of you are using your HT receivers as pre-amps to power amplifiers.

I currently have a Yamaha receiver, and was thinking of getting a seperate power amplifier to use on the front two speakers for music.

Would any of you recommend this? Would i really be gaining anything in terms of sound quality?

Thanks for the input.

[SQLGuy]

I'm using an Outlaw 990 (A/V preamp) with separate power amps. This gives the greatest flexibility, I think, since there are many outputs and many ways something like the 990 can be configured.

I needed a lot of power to drive my main speakers anyway, and they're bi-amped, so an HT receiver would have been mostly unused in my setup. If you were using some of the internal power channels from the receiver, then it's probably worthwhile to keep it and mix internal and external amps. If you're just using it as a preamp, you might want to sell it and look at an Outlaw or some such.

My .02.

Paul

[Rob_S]

Depends on the power amps using inside the AV amp. I had a Yamaha AV receivers some years back and found the amplification side not to be too great (it was not one of the expensive ones). By adding a power amp for the front channels it greatly improved the sound.

Best way to check is if you can borrow a power amp from somewhere and give it a go?

[planet10]

Originally posted by Rob_S
Best way to check is if you can borrow a power amp from somewhere and give it a go?

Suggested.

The amps in most A/V receivers usually suffer heavily from cost accounting. Adding a separate power amp, not only improves things right there, it frees up the power supply grunt used to power those channels to all the other channels.

Also try setting the centre to virtual.

dave

PS: similar to Paul's system, i use a Technics A/V DAC/decoder for my HT needs. This flows into an entirely separate stereo hifi rig (my HT is 2,1 -- the sub is only used for HT)