Best Amp with Magnepan 3.6's

That's cool...I love my 400xi:O) Sometimes I think room acoustics and tweaking can mean more than anything. I remember listening to my system before I put the MIT Oracle AC 2 PC on the 400xi and the Cardas kit on the Maggie crossovers, the NBS jumpers on the attenuaters, the HiFi tuning fuses throughout, the solid oak platforms and brass footers under my gear and subs etc... Loving care can make a difference.

Agreed. My room is currently 100% guaranteed to be the weak point in my setup. All other mods / changes are on hold until I can 'fix' the room.

Of course, WAF is paramount at this point, since wall treatments and clouds are out of the question. Maybe some diffusion behind my panels would fly, but that would require some engineering or at MINIMUM at trip to the artificial plant store.

I am in the process of designing new hardwood frames and investigating rebuilding the crossovers to optimum, but stock design. Maggies are a DIY dream speaker.

Krell makes great stuff and it is still my favorite movie. But, I can't pass the physical to move it in, let alone afford the extra AC to keep the house cool in summer OR, for that matter, simply AFFORD it!!!

Maggie 3.6R is a wonderful speaker, I drove mine with a Rowland Continuum 500. The bigger amp really made the bass tighten and go deep without any loss of mid/top sweetness. Jeff's new amps work great with Maggie loads.

Bryston is great, and the Innersounds are also a good pick. Of all of these listed here in the thread, I have to 2nd the Pass amps and to say that as far as I can tell they are in a whole other league compared to most of what is mentioned here.

Innersound will have many more watts/$, but not quite the same sound in the mid and high frequencies. Bryston and Innersound are probably right on the inflection point on the curve of value/$ - the perfect place if you don't want to spend megabucks but want very serious gear.

That said, you can always pick up a used Pass Amp here or at RenoHiFi. However - be very careful. For Maggies, you only want to look at the .5 series (the most recent incarnation). So, for example 150.5, not 150. Or XA60.5, not XA60. (If you have 8-ohm speakers then it doesn't matter.) I would think that a used 150.5 might treat you really well and would be on the lower end for the Pass gear.

Some people say with maggies slightly lower quality and higher watts results in a more pleasing experience in the end. I have to say, I recently hooked up a kilowatt amp for 2 months (of much much lower quality overall than what I run normally) and it did bring out a different feeling than what I usually run and has me trying to figure out how to upgrade to higher watts.

In that vein, huge Kudos to Spectron as mentioned above. And - I haven't heard this but do wonder about it - as an interim value/$ play it would be interesting to do the highest wattage NuForce, Rowland, or even the super-high-wattage Rotel. I think that would be the 1572? 500 watts/channel at 4 ohms? And not very expensive compared to Pass or Spectron or even NuForce.

The drawback on some of the Class D stuff is the upper-mid and high range. So, if you got the 1572 for now, then in 3 years (or 3 months :)?) get something like a Pass Labs XA30.5 (Class A amp - extremely rare these days), and actively bi-amp, with the 500W on the bottom end, and the XA30.5 on the top end. That would be absolutely awesome! And a good value for what you are getting. I looked at the Rotel distortion curve vs freq several months ago, and the problems start well above the 200 - 250 crossover point that you would use on the 3.6s. The curve is totally flat below 250 Hz, can't remember, but I think it was 450 or 550 where it started moving up.

That said, here is a guy with Bryston hooked up to > 100k speakers.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1260298401

The one thing I do agree with, is that people should focus more on speakers than the rest of the system. Many amps are extremely similar, same with CD players, but speakers are very, very different. I've found after many years of doing this that speakers and actually the pre-amp are the 2 critical pieces. I know there is a big 'source-as-important' camp out there as well, but for me many, many, many CD players and many, many, many DA converters sound extremely similar.