Premier Rock Forum

Krev wrote: Mon Feb 23, 2026 4:15 pm

twelvepoint wrote: Mon Feb 23, 2026 3:27 pm Any reccos for tower speakers? I currently use B&W CDM1SE on stands, and they sound fine but don’t have any bass. If my space had the right dimensions I’d get my old Klipsch Heresy 2s out of storage and be happy. I have a newish 100w Yamaha integrated amp, fwiw and just wanna rock Love it to Death on vinyl. I’m a man of simple taste. Used market is fine. Something that’s not esoteric. I dunno… $1500 or less?

I bought a Dayton 8" powered sub years ago, and it did the trick.

Not a bad idea for offloading the bass that my bookshelf speakers are trying to handle

motorbike guy wrote: Fri Feb 20, 2026 10:45 am

gazza wrote: Tue Feb 17, 2026 9:11 am Just picked up a set of B&W Matrix 801 S3 speakers (just black, no fancy finish) with the sound anchor stands and internal North Creek crossovers for a really good price. Any strong suggestions for an amp/preamp to go with these? I've seen the older Adcom gfa555 mentioned here before. Does that still hold true?

the Adcom amps are OK, but you can do better. Look for a used Bryston. Or Benchmark. Or if new is your bag, check out Schitt Audio - they have some nice power amps for good money.

Preamps - good preamps are getting cheaper, because everybody wants a built in streamer and dac. 5 year old preamps don' t often have those. So be on the lookout. I have not heard the Schitt preamps, but people seem to like them.

I've been convinced. My plan as of now is to get either a used Bryston 4b or Parasound A21 (whichever I can find for a good price) and then go with the Schiit Kara and Skoll for preamp and phono pre. The Skoll has very similar specs to the Lehmann black cube and the Kara seems to be a bit better than the Myryad MP100. The price to performance for all of those seem to be really good. I wasn't totally convinced by the "equivalent" Schiit power amp since it's more money (based on current eBay listings) and less power for probably very similar audio quality.

Can we talk about subwoofers?

I wanna get one, but I'm not sure how I'd hook it up to my integrated amplifier, which has right and left "aux out" RCA plugs.

If the RCA plugs will work and send a signal to the sub, feel like that would not be cutting off the lower frequencies to the bookshelf speakers and it seems to me that some of the idea of having a subwoofer is to relieve the mains from having to produce frequencies below whatever the crossover is set at on the sub. Also, if I Aux Out will the integrated amp still send signal to the main speakers?

Am I way off about all this? Does anyone make an amplifer that does do this?