upgrde to maggie 3.6 or i.6 with better amplifier

The 3.6's will require a lot more (clean) power opposed to the 1.6's. You could upgrade your amp and get better sound from 1.6's too. Then you could acquire the 3.6's and drive them with out issue..........

You can do both. It will cost you about $2500 to upgrade to 3.6s, and about $1000 to sell the DNA1 and get a BATVK500. $1500 can be put towards upgrading the turntable combo and/or preamp. Of course all this is going w/used gear via Audiogon. An older preamp with decent built-in phono stage(e.g. Audio Research sp-6) will give you superior value until you can afford a better preamp to go along with the rest.
Long range, consider moving to Wolcott tube monoblocks to drive the 3.6s. They'll set you back a few $$$! Cheers,
Spencer

Upgrade to the 1.6QR and get a full function Hovland preamp. It should cost you less $3000, net. Then upgrade the cartridge.

Why the need for the 3.6? Why not consider the Maggie 3.3 or 3.5? For just a couple hundred $$ more than the 1.6 on the used market, these are magnitudes beyond the 1.6 in the context of frequency extreme extension, 3-dimensionality and midrange texture. There is a pair of 3.3's here for $1250 and this is a killer value. Your room is a great size for the larger Maggies.

For an amp, you might consider another DNA1 for $1k or so and now you have a pair of these driving the 3.3s. Or consider one of the bigger Counterpoint 20/220 amps. I ran my 3.3 and 3.5 Maggies with the Counterpoint which was a huge step up from ARC tube amps to control this speaker. And this combination had a wonderful tonal coherency and natural musicality. I later went with Wolcotts which brought back some of the 3-dimensionality and bloom and had great driveability of these speakers. But your front end needs a lot of attention before I could ever suggest pouring out $4-5k for the Wolcotts.

The above suggestions would cost you about $1000-1500 from what you have and alone would knock your socks off. This leaves you a lot left to focus on preamp and sources. A tube preamp really is a must with these speakers. An ARC SP-8 would be awesome here in the $800-1000 range. And this still leaves plenty to keep your Sony as a transport and pair it with a nice DAC; the Electrocompaniet ECD1 in the $1200 range comes to mind. And still you have much $$ left to address a cartridge update as well.

A lot can be done with $5000 without the need to put it all in one place. In any case, pitch the Maggie Series 1.x idea; when you hear the Series 3.x, the 1.x is tough to go back to.

John

I bought the 3.6's last year and tried to run them with a pair of McIntosh 2125's bridged mono to 240 a side. This was no where near the power/current necessary. I ended up picking up a Classe CA 400 that drives the Maggies really well.

That being said, I think you would be happier upgrading the amp first then moving to the 3 Series, the differences are not subtle.