Crown amps

Try a Carver Professional ZR1600. At least look up details and reviews about it. It is a digital stereo amp, good for 600 wpc at 4 ohms. Sounds great, especially with Magneplanar speakers (which like lots of power). It caused a buzz in audiophile circles because of its audio quality...not to be expected from a utilitarian pro sound amp. The best part is that it sells for less than a grand.

Well in general they will not be as sweet on mids and highs.. Bass is fine.. Main problem with most pro designs are they run loud and hot… They have fans that make a ton of noise if your actually listening to a home stereo, and normally unless you have balanced connections on your other equipment, lots of conversion adaptors/cables etc.. Just to hook them up, also remember some pro audio gear will not get full gain from all consumer products, so sometimes you gotta add one of those voltage convertor deals that will take your 1.5 volt consumer preamp or receiver and up it to 4 volt into the amp to get full output. It can be done, and some pro amps can match up just fine with all these parameters, but make sure is all, and again no matter what you will not get standard RCA jacks on them.

Sorry I just saw you have a crown preamp… Look at Fanless crown designs like the K series maybe?

Undertow mentions a couple of points about pro sound power amps. With regard to the ZR1600....sensitivity is no problem. A jumper plug lets you select any of four sensitivities, 0.316, 0.775, 1.23 and 2.45 vrms. The 0.316 value is for consumer single ended sources, and the 1.25 vrms value is for normal pro sound balanced lines.
The ZR1600 does have a fan. It is said that for home audio use it can be disconnected, but a better approach is to swap it for a very low noise fan that you won't hear even when no music is playing. For single ended RCA input you need only a MONO 1/4 inch phone jack to RCA adapter. (MONO provides the grounding of the (-) balanced input pin). Finally, being a digital amp, it wastes almost no power and runs cold.

Thanks for all the info. My Crown pre-amp has a maximum output of 12 volts, so driving any one of these things should not be a problem. What I may have to deal with is hum, but I figure if I keep my runs to 4 feet that shouln't be a problem either. If I were to get one I think I would go with the Crown XTI-2000. 475 watts into 8 ohms for $699.00. Everything I have read about there reliability has been great, I just have not read a lot about their sound quality. I liked the sound of the DC300a. If it sound like that I'll be happy. Has anyone heard one?