Hi JPL,
The equipment that you have is 25 or so years old. When I broke up with my wife in 1990, one of the first things that I did after I rented an apartment, was to purchase for myself a nearly identical system ... Adcom GTP 500 II preamp/ tuner, Adcom 545 amp, Magnavox 630 CD player, and KEF Q55 speakers.
If I read your post correctly, the system has always been connected, it is just that you and your wife did not do a lot of listening over the years.
What Tom has suggested makes sense ... let your system run for several days and then listen closely to see if you feel the same way. If you have a real audio store nearby (Best Buy does not count) go listen to new speakers with music you are familiar with. Speaker standards have changed pretty dramatically over the last 25 years. So has your memory, if it is anything like mine.
Adcom equipment was the first step up to the big leagues for a lot of people when they upgraded from the popular receiver/ turntable/ speaker set-ups in the 70's. Adcom made serious looking black boxes. In your current set-up, the weak link is the Adcom preamp/ tuner.
Adcom preamps were never smooth ... but they were not so harsh sounding that listening was intolerable. Even though Adcom represented a true step-up at the time for myself, the system was never consistently pleasing. I stayed with the Adcom components as the system anchors for about a dozen years. I changed out the speakers and cd player along the way, which helped. It was when I swapped in an old Marantz 2230 receiver for the preamp, that I noticed how lacking and limiting the Adcom preamp was.
If after a few days you feelings about your set-up have not changed, I might be tempted to swap in your HK 730 receiver and try it as a preamp or have it go directly into your speakers and see how it sounds. One point to note is that that your HK is even older than the Adcom and may have issues of its own.
You have some homework. Let us know how you make out and we can take it from there. Fortunately, there are a number of real alternatives out there that are reasonable cost wise to pursue.
Rich
