Best power amp for Avalon Opus Ceramique

Sphere: you are absolutely right. The longer I listen the more I have to agree (whereas I must say that I swapped my Nagra PL-L with a friends Ayre K-1xe which seems to suite the Avalons better than my PL-L). But as I have placed an order for Boulder 865 integrated I wonder if this was the right decision...-although I know that Boulder builds the best sounding SS gear (especially the series 2000 components). The all Ayre gear is very synergystic. Strangely I like the Cardas Golden Reference inbetween the Ayre gear more than the much more expensive Indra.

Trust me.If you compare any Lamm to the nice,yet overrated Kharma matrix your opinion of it will change!Not close!!

Heard great things about Lamm too.. Steve from GNSC highly recommends CAT or DartZell with Avalon and thinks Ayre is a great match as well.
At trade shows in Germany you always see them paired with Pass or Hovland amplification - sometimes at dealers show rooms with Ayre or Boulder but never ever with class D amps.

Frankpiet:The best cable match between these two is probably Transparent audio XL series.The best I heard was the NBS, but the cable costs more than all the gear put together,which in my humble opinion was a skewed way of thinking.

Hello Frankpiet and Sphere,
I have the Opus Ceramique along with X2.5/X150.5. Most of the cabling is NBS Omega I (speaker / power & pre) and the Stealth Indra for Cary 306 SACD & pre-amp.
I compared the NBS Omega I for source/pre with the Transp.Balanced (make sure it is the newer generation, the MM-technology) and the Transp. had firmer grip with the bass, more resolution and better soundstage; NBS was a bit lusher. This just proves that although some cable company stress the synergistic effect (certainly the case with NBS Omega I saying you should buy it "as a system") it pays to mix and Transparent does a good job for source/pre, however it is very very expensive. At the end I settled with Indra which was in-between.
Finally, here in Europe you will see the Opus Ceramique mostly paired with Hovland or Pass along with NBS or Transparent, but that might be the case because of the distributor ("Active Audio"). But it sounds great.....
cheers and good luck