Well. Got the second Acurus A250 on Friday. Tore the whole rig down and cleaned the rack and got the wires reorganized. I made two new speaker wires for each Mordaunt Short 502 using Canare QuadStar 4s11 cable, red tech flex, and yellow 3M shrink tube. Each A250 powers one MS502. The left channel for the HF and the right channel for the LF. The 502s also have a powered 10" sub. I use a y cable from the amps rca jacks to the single rca jack on the preouts........
Had a snag. Once it was all hooked up I got no sound. Nada. Zip. Finally figured it out to be my PrePro. I put my bedroom receiver, (Denon AVR1801), in the system, and everything works fine. The pre is under warranty.....
So I took SPL measurements before I broke it all down, but now they are skewed as the prepro is gone.....
Without giving you a Stereophile review.........I first noticed that the music was much louder and more defined. On my reference tracks......
Al Green DVD-A Greatest Hits, I'm so tired of being alone, and I'm still in love with you..........the drums are just amazing. I don't know the name of it but when a drummer hits the hollow wooden sounding thing, it makes a ticking noise........was just inside my head like I was there. And Al's vocals sounded like I was in the studio........Yes Fragile DVD-A.......the opening guitar on Roundabout was much more pronounced and youarethereish. SteelyDan Gaucho, SACD, Babylon Sister....once againg the drum sounds were amazing.
And Beethoven's 9th, SACD, LSO. the bass was thunderous.
And before you all say this was psycho acoustics, I don't disagree at all. Most of life is perception. I will say what was interesting........even though the prepro was changed to an entry level receiver, I took spl readings with the new rig and my original reference song off my Fireball Server, Portishead's Dummy, It could be sweet. So even though I perceived the music to be much louder and clearer on my reference tracks, the SPL was almost identical!
Overall I am totally pleased with my system to date. I have some Owens Corning 703 in the garage and will build some treatments for the room. I am going to save up for some new speakers but that is down the road aways....
My photos always look crappy when I upload them here, so here is a link to pictures of the new rig.......
twotreesrig.shutterfly.com