Your Pick Between These Two...

Wow, such great input so far, thanks all!

you know your room, tastes, budget, so I give advice regarding functions and features.

also I'm 71, semi-retired age 62, fully retired 65, so I have not heard much new stuff in many years. So it is 'ideas' and other active members, and use specs to guide you to an audition.

I'm all set with a wonderful pair of very efficient speakers from 1956, horn tweeters and horn mids, 15" woofers restored cones, custom rosewood enclosure. R2R been done, spare deck in a box. I did change back from McIntosh SS to tubes early last year, and upgraded my turntable recently, now I am done until ....

even an audition, so much is variable, if I zeroed in on something, and I could return/exchange something, I wouldn't let a less than ideal listen in a showroom be the final determinant. at a certain point you get an instinct about showrooms, sales persons, iow, it would be a shame to miss something great because of .....

I don't like ports, I would rather see a full range if the room size and budget allows, or a very nice pair with no real low bass, coupled with a stereo pair of self-powered subs, located with the small mains, front firing. bass is, and bass overtones are directional.

you want the signal split at a crossover in the sub or before the sub, so no low bass is sent to your main amp and the mains don't try to make low bass. then adjust, move, get it right in the room. For my small home theater, I have a single self powered sub adding dinosaur stomp of Jurassic Park, otherwise the mains handle full range. It is amazing how often I need to put my AV receiver back to DIRECT (often 2 channel), the cable providers send weird mixes, receivers make up surround, the import of this is, the 2 channel original very often sounds best, so, your home theater mains want to be full range, enough clean ballanced bass for most video.

so, efficient speakers to reduce your power needs. self-powered sub to reduce your power needs. crossover to take bass load away from main amp and main speakers.

that sets you up to afford a moderate size tube amp, a wonderful thing. 

Lots of opinions, but hardly any firsthand experience. I have the Magico A3 for almost two years now. The A3’s are superb, but if you are like so many here who prefer colored sound, and that is fine, you may want to go elsewhere. You need to try and listen yourself, objectively at their price they are unbeatable.