Amp Question Please advise

I can answer your question 2 ways. 1st, yes an amp will improve not only the bass but the overrall sound of your 40s. Generally, the amplification is the weakest aspect of most receivers, and their ratings are often based on a narrow frequency range driving 1 channel. Not 2 or much less 5 simultaneously. I have an Arcam AVR100 with Maggies, and was amazed at how better my bass response was when I added an Ayre V-3 amp. The Arcam is no slouch, but it has an almost nostalgic sound that can be a touch soft. The Ayre drives the speakers with more bass, dynamics and slam.

A 2 channel amp would also allow you the option of adding a 2 channel preamp for music later on. And just using the 3805 for movies, and to drive your center and surrounds.

2nd, the 40s are good speakers, and like most monitors don't have a great deal of bass anyway. If you stepped up to the 60s you'd be surprised at how much more bass you get. Whatever way you go, I'd get an amp 1st to better drive the mains, then decide later on if you need to look at changing out your speakers or the Denon.

I'm not sure of your price range, but an NAD 218, Rotel 1080, or perhaps a Parasound A23 is where I'd start.

I should think that the Denon 3805 at 120 WPC is enough for these highly efficient speakers (91 db at 1 meter for 1 watt), especially if your problem, as you have described, is at low listening levels.

A bigger amplifier will ONLY help at higher output levels where the lower power amplifier will CLIP...of course this can happen at low listening levels too... provided the source has a heavy amount of base like in an earthquake or dinosaur footsteps during a movie.

(Aside: Tweeters require almost no power...50 watts is about the most they ever require at any sound level....base is a different matter, however, and a single 15" cone in a professional quality sub woofer will generally need several hundred to one thousand watts....typically under powered amps will clip when driven too hard and then the distorted sound will burn or damage your tweeter as the coils get overly hot from being driven by a square wave.)

These days almost all solid state amplifiers have a VERY flat frequency response for a variety of speaker loads and Denon will be no exception.

Your room and speakers will NOT be flat frequency reponse....especially at the low end ....where the small size cabinets of the 40's will rely on speaker placement (walls) and the built in tuned port to generate low end (below 120 Hz).

I'm curious about the speaker wiring you are using, I have experimented around with different speaker wiring, especially the center channel, and found a great difference in "intelligibility" with different cables on the Paradigm CC I was using for quite awhile. It seemed like with some wires I needed to turn volume up quite abit to get center voice frequencies properly. My current 5.1 setup has speakers that do not require any thing special in the way of cabling (TBI).
But even those are helped with some wire that favors mid-voice range.....let us know how it all works out...good luck, Mike.

Hey Cheapmike , I am using 12 gague SJ Cable for speaker wire
I have herd good things about using power extition cord wire as speaker wire
I was also thinking about trying better cables wires & bi-amping BUT I can not bi-amp my denon & run an outdoor set of speakers on zone 2
Shadorne you got me more confused now I am looking for better lows for music not HT -low listning backround music

Antman27,

I am not familiar with the Denon 3805 surround processor. I assumed that for two channel music that you program this Denon amp to send the audio signal also to the subwoofer as well as the left and right channels (many surround processors allow this option). If this is not possible then my suggestion to try a beefier sub woofer (PDR 12) will not help you at all with your music... in this case you might want to look at a surround processor that does allow you to drive your PDR 8 when playing stereo source music or, alternatively, larger front speakers with more defined base reponse (usually means larger cones and may unfortunately be much less esthetic for your room).