ISO Advise on choosing Ayre or Bat power amp

the ayre is excellent, sorry i have not heard the bat

if any knock on ayre's is compared to other top ss amps the deep bass can be a touch light

on the other hand ayre's have tremendously low noise floor, notes come out of deep darkness, very beautiful...

I’m sure both the Ayre and BAT are very nice amps but are you sure they’ll have enough juice to push your Aerial’s to their potential, especially in your room? I would check on that before you make the purchase. I have 7B’s and on those the sweet spot was getting an amp that can deliver 250 watts at 8 ohm; amps 200 watts and less definitely worked but they fell short a little.

I don’t play loud, but on smaller amps my Aerials needed to be pushed more to be enjoyable whereas my current amp I can listen to low levels and and not feel the need to crank it up.

A friend had Aerials that were kind of power hungry.   If you can find an Ayre V1XE...they have and sound much more powerful. In any case,  Ayre uses differentially balanced circuits and sound much better with XLR balanced interconnects.

Adg101-
 Both these amps put out 300wpc at 4ohms so I think that should be adequate?
Since the 4 ohms power is twice at at 8ohms, that is supposed to indicate high current....please correct me if I’m off on that!
I may consider a parasound A21+ just for the extra 200wpc into 4 ohms although I don’t know if the Parasound would have the same level of finesse, speed and linearity as the other two...?
stringreen-
yes, I would only use xlr balanced interconnects on either amp as both are fully balanced in and out!

If your Aerial Acoustics LR-5s can be bi-wired, I'd get a used BAT VK-300SE integrated and add the VK-225SE later. This bi-amp setup will rock-down the house and sound damn fine doing it. Make sure the VK-300SE isn't too old, however, as it's been in production a long time.