Enjoying the music

Now after about one week of having the music system, I may have run it for about 15 hours in total.

Some initial findings:

The Krell manual recommends to leave the Amplifier in standby mode if not playing it.

In this standby mode the amp is still using quite a bit of power and gets quite warm to the touch. Some days it is especially warm, I would say hot even, although it is in standby mode. So have to switch on the air cond to cool it down a bit when playing the music.

After the first 10 hours of running in, I can hear clearer details from the speakers. So the speakers needed to break-in as well. Perhaps the rubber compound around the mid bass driver are made to this stiffness.

The bass is not much to shout about. Having heard Uncle_vic's setup, I am fairly certain that in time to come I will need to get an active sub woofer. The low deep trembling bass sounds does make a big, big difference to whatever you are listening. But one thing is that this low bass should not be so much as to overpower the high and mid range sounds.

But if I wanted the thunderous bass, I would have to get a AVR amplifier either the 5.1 or 7.1 systems, a big sub woofer and 4 surround speakers to create that cinema effect.

But for the moment, the stereo music is good enough for me. The Krell amp is a big improvement over the last integrated amplifier that I had. I was using a Synthesis Magnum 100 amplifier. This is a hybrid integrated amplifier with valves in the pre-amp section and solid state electronics in the power-amp section. It is rated at 100 watts at 4 ohms and 60 watts at 8 ohms. I was using this hybrid amp to drive the ATC speakers and although the clarity is good, somehow it was not as lively and compelling as other systems that I have heard. The bass was really quite soft but vocal sounds were acceptable. The treble is what will normally create the effect of being in the room where the musicians were playing. In this case, the Magnum amp's treble was not as good as the Krell. The Krell's treble allow you to have quite a good sense of the instruments being played and gives out a lot of details as compared to the Magnum amp. But of course, the price of both products and the power wattage are in a different category as well, so it is not fair to compare in this case.

I have also connected the Astro decoder to the Krell amp through one of the RCA inputs. But what I find is that the sound from the Astro is quite soft compared to the CD player. So in the end, I had to use the Krell's menu option to increase the sound level by another 6 decibels (the max amount is +6). I could do this to increase or decrease for the inputs separately. Which means all the 3 RCA, the balanced XLR, and the Ipod input could be increased or decreased independantly of each other. This then solved the problem. Now listening to the CD Player and the TV, I could set the volume at about 60 to 80 db.


Really getting to enjoy the music more and more.