B&W are often voiced for showroom sound, louder in the upper treble, that can fatigue in a domestic setting. JBL are normall neutral or have a little more bass than neutral, which can sound a little more manufactured than flat like Revel or Focal, but never annoys me too much.@Helicopter wow, JBL over B&W? I honestly thought the B&W's were pretty awesome based off all the amazing reviews online about it. I'm actually starting to now look at Denon AVR-X4300H because of it's built-in Alexa functionality as a nice little bonus. Still undecided.
Thanks @amper42 I'm little nervous now though, since you reckon anything over "background noise" would probably need an external amp. I'd still like the ability to turn up the volume (even on just the 6 living room speakers) every now & then, would that be okay? Or did you mean if I was wanting to play out all 8 speakers at once?
Not sure what is available in your market. One of the Niles or Russound 8+ channel amps would be great. You could get a March Audio (made in Australia!) P502 and run it in series-parallel.In the ideal setup, what AVR and dedicated Power Amp would you recommend without blowing the budget here?
i.e. would I be getting an AVR as well as a Power Amp hooked up with it? And if so, based on what I'm trying to do here (with the 6 living room speakers and 2 outdoors) what AVR and Power Amp would you get? Again, I don't want to be spending huge huge amounts here compared to what I was already quoted with just the X3700H (acknowledging though that it will be somewhat more expensive since the X3700H alone may not be the best solution)
Yes, and my transformer setup always delivers less than 1/4 of a stereo input to each of the 8 speakers, so maybe 10% of the amp power. A 3700 will deliver 1/6 of the power to each of the 6 speakers, so it should do better per speaker, and you will have 6 rather than 4 of them. Even if you are running 8 speakers you should be fine. I really doubt you will have a problem unless you want to go way beyond the volume I can get away with when there is anyone else in the house.Alright so when you're running ONLY your 4 internal/in-wall speakers (leaving your 4 externals off) you get some great volume out of them though?
That's really all I want to be sure of - like you, we wouldn't be using the external speakers anywhere near as much as we'd use the internal 6 speakers, so as long as while only those 6 living room ones are on, I'd still want to be able to get decent volume out of them, more so than just "subtle background noise"