Two in one system

Starting from the living room and moving into the dedicated room, the journey continues. All this while, I am doing the room for home theater purpose. Watching movie have never been the same again once you a have dedicated room. Although I had enjoy much of movies but something else crept up on my mind. What about stereo music ? The B&W speaker is really made for stereo and using it only for home theater is not fully utilizing it. Now having that in mind, I do something that is capable doing double duty. After doing some research and some consultation with friends, decided to get rid of the Emotiva processor and the power amp.

Looking from the pic above you can see that I had gone back to AVR from pre pro setup. This is the Yamaha A-3050 , the first Yamaha AVR that supports Dolby Atmos and DTS X. The model is from year 2015 and is the top of the line Yamaha AVR in that time. This is a 11.2 channel AVR. The price is very reasonable too, roughly about RM7,000. Keeping in mind that I wanted dual usage on my setup, I wanted Yamaha for the neutral sound. So this AVR will serve the purpose of surround sound and also pre amp on stereo.

Next up will be the new integrated amplifier which was highly recommended by a friend of mine. This is the Musical Paradise MP-501 integrated tube amp. It has 4 x KT150 power tubes which is capable of 65 watt in stereo mode. Coming from solid state amp into tube, it really makes me love music. The price for this nice amp is about RM6500, I guess is quite ok for this is a China brand. One of the important factor is that this integrated amp support HT bypass. With the HT bypass feature, with just a flip of a switch it can be an integrated amp or merely being a power amp only. This serve the purpose for me to be able to have pure 2 channel and also using it as power amp for the home theater. 

So now we have all the hardware for the audio, except that I still needed something to playback for my audio. This is the first time I have venture into digital audio playback. Had been reading quite a bit online on DAC. To be honest after much reading, I still don't quite know what is the DAC going to do for me. Nevertheless, I went to get this Arcam rDAC. A very simple dac with coaxial, USB and optical input with 1 pair of analogue output. It pretty much do 24/192 sampling. I simply hook up my Dell laptop to it play with foobar. All the files are loaded in external hard drive to be use. 

This is how the overall setup had changed into with the Yamaha, tube amp and the Arcam DAC. This is pretty decent given the fact that I have no idea what I was doing but just reading from internet. As a matter of fact, I had enjoy it very much. Hifi is really something far more complicated than home theater. Getting music nirvana is something I had invested a lot more than my home theater throughout the years. Till today, there are more things that I had wanted but still haven't get the chance to try it out. Hopefully this year will the the time to venture into analogue audio with vinyl record and turntable. Till that time comes, the journey continue.