What preamp between Burmester and Krell?

I don't intend to replace the Audio Note poweramps with Burmester. The idea is eventualy to use them both (all the 4 monos) in a biamping configuration.

Nik, your post dated 1-24-14 in the other thread I linked to above appeared to indicate otherwise.

As far as I can tell all of the currently produced Burmester amps have VASTLY greater power capability (and undoubtedly very different gains) than the Audio Note amps, especially when used as monoblocks. See my post in the other thread for the issues that would be presented by using both of those amps in a biamp configuration. Even if you somehow gain match the amps, most of the power capability of the Burmester amps would be unuseable and wasted. In effect you would be converting the high powered Burmester monoblocks into low powered amps.

With all due respect, as I see it biamping an 8 watt tube amp with a very high powered solid state amp (in conjunction with a pair of integrated speakers that are designed to work in a reasonable manner when driven by a single amplifier, as opposed to an assembly of separate speaker components for each of the frequency ranges) makes no sense. And that is all aside from and in addition to the possibility of compromised sonics resulting from driving the speakers with different sounding amps.

Regards,
-- Al

Nik,
I sincerely wish you a successful outcome but I'd pay much attention to Al's always astute advice and contributions. Give yor plan some serious thought.
Charles,

I would second the advice given by Al, both in this thread and the other. Passive bi-amping is not easy to do well, and why spend all that money to use a fraction of the power in the Burmester. You might consider using the money aimed at the Burmesters to try a different amplifier with more power to run your speakers full-range (or maybe the Burmesters by themselves). If you're really convinced to try biamping, you should try to find a preamp with two pairs of outputs (I don't know if the Krell or Burmester units have that capability, but many preamps, including the Lamm LL2, do).

Being aware of the difference in the output voltage of the amps I was told by knowledgable guys that the gain difference may be compensated and adjusted in a way that for all the amps would be possible to be ran by a single preamp without deteriorating the signal. But, yes each seting like this will prevent the possibility of the more powerful amp to show its full power.

My point on the preamp was more a practical one--if you have one set of outputs from the preamp, you will need some type of a signal splitter between each channel of the preamp and the two amplifiers being fed by it. While such devices do exist, they can be seen by some as degrading the sound. My experience has been hearing a slight improvement when I used a second output from my preamp vs. using Monster dual-headed RCA adapters out of a single output (we converted an unused input in my Shindo preamp to create a second output).