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Another New Member Looking for Advice (preamp and speaker setup)

I started using the search function to try to get a general sense of what would work and what wouldn't work.  There are so many opinions that it was hard to track a good outcome, so I'm attempting a thread to see if I could get help for my specific situation. 

*Please forgive me that I have a hard time verbalizing what I enjoy about what sounds good to me (i.e. clinical or warmer)*

History / Goal:
I grew up building sound quality competition cars and used to sing and play guitar in a band myself.  Music has always been an intricate part of my life and a passion.  

Recently, I started to listen to some higher end systems throughout Dallas-Fort Worth and absolutely loved what I heard.  Some of the systems went into the 100k range which was insane (and quite frankly, far out of my budget here) and great to experience.  Doing this, unfortunately, started to create a bug of wanting to upgrade my reallllly old lower end system.

Budget:
Ideally ~$10k

Current Lowly Setup:
Rotel RC-1070
Rotel RB-1070
Polk Audio A7s
12" 750W Subwoofer (can't for the life of me remember the name while typing this)

Current Idea(s):
Rotel 1572 Preamplifier (only reason being it appears it would achieve all the things I wanted and match)
Keep my Rotel RB-1070 for now
Bowers & Wilkins 804D3 - (~$6,500 used from here / heard B&W many times and enjoyed them each time)
OR go way over budget and get a pair of Wilson Audio Sabrinas - $16k (which I instantly fell in love with)

My main input is going to be Tidal and digital music for now, eventually a phono. 

Am I thinking about this correctly, or would there be something that I should consider besides my current thoughts?  I'm open to any and all ideas.   Thanks for your time helping me!  
8thsin
8thsin's avatar
8thsin OP
2 posts
 
This is great!  I really appreciate everyone's response here.  I'm definitely going to take a step back and rethink things given the above.  

@caphill - I really appreciate the detailed post and there is a lot to  unpack here.  I'm definitely not stuck on Rotel, but was more going for bandaid fix to my current system.  Probably not the long term wisest idea.

This upcoming weekend I was planning to review some Golden Ears and ProAcs, as I've never heard them.  There seems to be about 10,000 brands that I've never heard of.  To be open, I didn't know there were such things as audio clubs :| 
- I guess growing up in a very small town in Idaho comes with some drawbacks.  haha


twoleftears's avatar
twoleftears
1,457 posts
 
Rotel and B&W share the same distributor, and dealers have been known to, errr, enthusiastically promote their synergy.  Your proposed plan of action will have good results; you can probably do at least a little better, depending on how much time/effort you want to put into it.  For instance, not that far from the Rotels in price point would be the Belles Aria preamp + sterero amp or + mono amps.  Pushing up the budget to Sabrina level brings a whole slew of other speakers into play.
soix
2,133 posts
 
I'd recommend taking your time and starting completely from scratch.  First and foremost I'd say make sure you get the speakers right, then find the electronics that drive them properly and mate well sonically.  I can almost guarantee that won't be Rotel, which is why I said to just start from scratch.  Agree with others there are lots of alternatives to B&W, and you're very fortunate to live in probably one of the best places in the country to hear many different brands.  This is just an example, but I got to compare several B&W models to similar Joseph Audio speakers, and for music and to my ears the JAs were superior in every way.  Not that B&Ws are bad at all (like @caphill I like them for HT but not so much for music), but it just shows how important it is to hear many different speakers to figure out what speaker characteristics are most important to YOU -- and there just ain't no shortcut for that.  The good new is, it's fun!!!

Along with Joseph Audio I'd echo some speakers mentioned above and highly recommend ProAc, Vandersteen, Vienna Acoustics, Silverline, Spendor, Harbeth, and DeVore if you can find them.  Also, since you're a musician I'd definitely try to hear ATC speakers as they're frequently used in recording studios and sometimes sound better to musicians than some more "audiophile" type speakers.  Oh, and make sure you bring a representative sample of your favorite music (hopefully including some well-recorded stuff) to listen to in addition to whatever the dealer likes to play to show a speaker's strengths.  Anyway, hope this helps and best of luck in your search.  And don't forget to HAVE FUN!!!
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