My stereo isn't doing it for me. Need advice

BTW I own Dynaudios and run them off a very good quality BEl Canto Class D amp and this is a very good match to work with.

I have also heard KEF ls50s in my system. Like Dynaudios, these are also not tube amp friendly speakers. THey sounded good with my 500 w/ch Class D amps also in a smaller room but very thin off a different 180 w/ch SS amp (not Class D) in a larger room. These are good speakers but small so they can only provide full sound in a room that is not too big.

So all your speakers are a match on paper to teh Class D amp, and are not tube amp friendly. SO best PERFORMANCE with Dynaudios and teh KEFs will be achieved with a high power Class D or similar SS amp.

Applying a sub to offload the low end would work towards the end of using these speakers with the tube amp.

You have the best chance of getting the best sound fastest by optimizing the performance of teh gear that will be working together. Once performance is optimized, ie all gear is a technical match, tehn you are in a position to tweak teh sound to your tastes in various ways from there.

BTW I have heard of several cases where people were sold Primaluna tube gear by dealers with no consideration to what speakers would be used. In all cases the tube amp was changed to a more suitable SS or Class D amp specifically to get to where people wanted.

Or you could go with higher efficiency easier to drive speakers like Tekton or ZU or Klipsch for example to match to the tube amp better.

If tyou keep the PL tube pre-amp, make sure the input impedance of the Class D or SS amp you use with it is 40Kohm or higher in order to assure a good match between higher output impedance tube pre-amp and SS amplifier. IMpedance matching like this is another key for optimizing performance as a stepping stone to getting the best sound possible via tweaking from there.

Before you go buying anything else, can you give a few examples of CDs you are listening to that sound bad? Just want to make sure you're not judging a lot of really good equipment against some really bad recordings. I was just listening to Benjamin Orr's (from The Cars) "The Lace" and it sounds like when they recorded it one of the engineers fell asleep at the board and accidentally shoved all the high frequency sliders to max. There are so many bad recordings, if a person judges good equipment with them it would be easy to think you've created a bad system or have a bad room when in fact neither is the case.

That's a tough room. You will probably never get any speakers to sing at more than a moderate volume. Anything beyond that and you are overloading the room and exciting bass nodes too.

You said that some acoustic stuff sounds great. I say live with what you've got until you can move into a decent sized room.

Shakey

Thanks for all the help. Going to change out the CD player first and see what happens. Been considering Ascend speakers and Tekton. Had Klipsch Forte's with a previous system and the sounded okay but too bright.

I don't think the CDP is the main culprit. Room acoustics, amp/speaker synergy and cable synergy should be the focus. Ascend and Tekton are not an upgrade(possible downgrade)from your current speakers. I've heard Vienna Acoustic speakers(Haydn SE?) sound excellent with Prima Luna gear. Another monitor option(have not demoed)is the Coincident Triumph Extreme 2 which is made for tube gear and is claimed to have accurate bass under 50hz.