Every time i ask a retailer about low volume fidelity they are always trying to sell me more power, separates, or stereo amps. I have a Marantz sr6011 that has decent power but i am looking for fidelity.
I can only repeat what Pogre, lovinthehd, and KEW have already said. If your speakers have good fidelity at high volume, but not at low volume, it's not the amp, it's the speakers. A higher powered amp can create more headroom (lack of clipping) when there are peaks in the music, but it cannot affect the sound quality at low volumes.
@LuisEcho – Please help by better defining what you mean by "low volume fidelity".
- Do you mean frequency range? Is there less sound only at the low or high frequencies?
- Or do you mean something else? Is the overall sound quality different? As KEW described above, "do your speakers sound poor at low (volume) levels and then come into their own once you open them up?" Does music sound as if it's coming only from inside the speaker cabinets at low volume? And at high volume does the music sound as if it's coming from outside the speaker cabinets?
Both of these types of 'low fidelity' are due to the speakers and not the amplifier power.
In my experience, the type of low fidelity I described in my second bullet is due to poor off-axis dispersion of sound by the drivers used in the speakers. Widely dispersed off-axis sound is what helps speakers create a wider image and sound stage. Some speakers do that only at higher volumes, and other speakers can do that at both low and high volumes. No amp that I know of can affect that.
