wilson

I have no horse in this race stanwine, but I would strongly urge you to not waste the extra money on the likes of Lamm or VTL or any other of the overpriced nonsense sold these days...been there done that! Audition a VS115 amp from audio research...it will make great music and you could get an LS26 or even a Ref 3 as well for the price of one of the other amps. You could even skip the preamp and go with a wadia or levinson CDP with direct connect volume control...less stuff makes for purer sound.

>>You could even skip the preamp and go with a wadia or levinson CDP with direct connect volume control...less stuff makes for purer sound.<<

That's hardly true.

In my experience, in more cases than not, a linestage in conjunction with a digital source is preferable to the digital source direct.

I was hoping you would respond Audiofeil. It makes me smile inside everytime we disagree. You with your seasoned self assured vision of what is and should be and then there is me with...shall we say, a more impressionistic and impassioned approach to things audio:) You are correct here, most of the time a great linestage will improve things, but I have used the ARC/Wilson/Levinson combo before and it does sound awful nice sans preamp. All depends on your listening criteria and budget.

Since you already have a superb power amplifier I would suggest listening to an ACT2 series 2 in your system. The premier 350 is very detailed and deserves a better preamplifier - the 18LS is not in the good enough for the 350.
IMHO an ARC ref3 - ref110 combo is in the same class as an ACT2 - premier 350, just a very different type of sound.
I have tried both systems with Wilson 7 some time ago, cables were Transparent for the cj , Shunyata for the ARC.