Ordered Magnepan LRS with a bass panel. Hopefully will arrive before I die. Looking to pair this with Anthem mx720 at about $2500. (Might need to add amp -- we'll see.) My primary interest by far is music, not the home theater experience. I do love the feeling of being surrounded by velociraptors, but it's just not my priority. I do not want separates. I mostly listen to orchestral, choral and jazz. I want highest quality music reproduction in this general price range -- could go a bit higher or lower. Is there an another AVR I should be considering for higher quality or same quality at lower price? Thanks
You should seriously rethink this.
From experience, most AVRs will run too hot driving the Magnepans and you will need an external fan like the AC Infinity and the necessary space around them. Definitely not for any enclosed cabinets. In addition, the Magnepan bass panel also needs amplification, it is not an active "sub". If you put this in parallel with LRS as suggested by Magnepan, you will likely see smoke coming out of the Denons and Anthems or most AVRs for that matter.
Any high-end AVR that might do OK will be obscenely expensive.
There is also an additional practical issue if you do room correction. The amps in AVRs don't have much headroom for correcting any dips especially in the lower frequencies and the small Maggies do need some help in the lower regions.
My suggestion would be to buy the least expensive AVR (Denon or Anthem) that will satisfy your connectivity, codecs and number of channels you need for other uses and a L and R pre-out. Even a slimline Marantz at <$600 will do.
Connect separate amp for driving the Maggies. 300W+ rated into as low as 2-ohms explicitly if you want to run the bass panels in parallel with the mains, or a separate 200W+ into 4ohms stereo for mains and a 200W+ into 4 ohms minimum monoblock for the bass panel.
Don't worry about high SINAD measurements or flat to 80k of the electronics for driving the small Maggies. No point in throwing money away for paper numbers that make no difference. Pick brands that have a good reputation for sturdy amps that have honest current delivery capabilities. Class Ds can provide good power, have small form factors and run cool and efficient. But I would also consider low-end ATI or Paradigm offerings. Even an Outlaw monoblock would be better than an AVR's amp capability.
If you have limited needs for the sources/channels you want to use, it may be possible to price-optimize the above further specifically customized for that use.
