Thosb - the broad brush paints a picture that the select few amps (which you guys end up with) seem to handle the difficult loads, mitigate "the harshness" or otherwise perform well without softening or sweetening the signal. Jim's view was that these are "good amps" which should be used with "good speakers". He tested amps and knew the designers and indeed many of the used our speakers for their design loads.
What I hear from the Adcom is somewhat bland / lifeless, grainy and dry. Not bad. Pretty good compared to many, but fairly vanilla compared with better.
Regarding dual inputs: I'll recap. We identified dual inputs as a good solution and used it in the CS3. Problems occurred when people used radically different cables for bass and treble and/or bi-amped with differing amps, including unmatched gain. These hassles were unacceptable to Jim, who put tons of energy into matching to within a fractional dB across the spectrum. Kathy polled dealers who thought at our price points life would be much simpler with single inputs. End of that story.
But the back story doesn't change. Since the current draw makes many amps misbehave, even if marginally, separating the bass loads from upper loads cleans things up enormously. There is a perceived problem by some that jumpers degrade the sound if you choose to single-input. I don't hear it when using Cardas high purity copper jumper plates, which are affordable and allow the user to substitute with jumper wires if desired. I like vertical bi-amping where one channel drives the woofer and the other channel drives the mid-tweeter. I don't have a good sample, since my amps are pretty good and I only have 1 Adcom stereo. (The second one arrived DOA and I opted for a refund unstead of repair.)
I suggest adding the second pair of posts when modding the XO. Beetle may chime in - he looked in to that with his 2.4 upgrade.
