As per the title l, I'm looking for a great bang for the buck option used/older receiver with preouts...I generally just use 5.1 setup for surround, and would settle for a 7.1 that perhaps had outputs that I'd assign as "height/presence" speakers to complement the 5.1 setup vs atmos, etc. I just have an old lower/mid tier yamaha (I think a 663 back when mud tier still had preouts in 2007/8) and I picked up a marantz 8001 for 50 bucks this week, but I need to do some work...the pre is noisy as hell, but the amp section is just fine and definitely worth the 50 bucks IMHO...in fact, I also went nuts and grabbed an 4802 Denon for 50 bucks as well when I saw the huge toroidal power supplies just to have another set of back up amp power for surround duties. I was hoping thr marantz pre worked because I already have my external 5 channel amp power, esp for 2 channel along with miniDSP for the Front Left and Right.
Anyway, I figured you guys experience would help set me on the right track pretty quickly or to least keep me from making a bad decision. Like technically my yamaha would even fit the bill but that pre can't power my external amps. I'm aware that the box store brands marantz and denon are generally the best and don't distort even when crossing the 2V threshold. My Tammie seems to fall apart at anything past 1.3volts, per my ears.
Thanks in advance for helping me out of this particular rabbit hole,
Eric
