A few general questions about amps

1. Your good friend George is just that, go buy him lunch. Get the very best two channel amp you possibly can to power your two front mains.

2. No, forget the watts issue, jump on the polk info section and read about how all watts are not created equally. You want a high current amplifier, you want to know the ampre pk2pk rating it should be at least 30 but the more the better, we are talking solid state amps. You can though get as many watts as you want, a quality amp will not harm your speakers despite the watt rating, also, you dont really need 200 watts to run your speakers, again you need a high current amplifier.

3. Despite the fact the Polk Peanut Gallery has indicated in prior posts their notion of BS and a lack of common sense, suggestions of the nth degree and all manner of anecdotes the fact is they are correct, I have no common sense about audio, of course neither do they. So as they lick the salt off their fingers read there comments and research everything we say and make up your own mind, Of course the result of our help is a bit of a confused spin for you to muddle threw.

So then, each amplifier circuit is a design of its audio creator, someone sat down and decided to bulid either a more effective amplifier or a more cost effecient amplifier at a certain price point, never confuse efficiency with effectiveness, two totally different concepts....so every piece of every amplifier can and does effect the sound signal as it passes through it to at least some degree, some very small, some large. The number of gain stages, the board design and wiring or traces, the capacitors used, the type and number of resistors, the vibration node points of the case, the wire used inside and on and on, so yes as you say amplifiers become known as warm, soft, detailed, bright, harsh.....Mr. Gordon Holt gave us this language and all of it is subjective, you can of course measure on scopes outputs and all sorts of things but you cannot measure how it sounds to you. Yes your H&K is the brains and the amp the brawn, well, at least in this simplified explanation here but learn about impendance and how it plays a part, so you recall I told your H&K is full of signal degrading parts and this is very true, but OK your doing HT and you need it and budget and all of those things, but understand this, an AVR is a compromise to efficiency in terms of convenience and cost to effectivness in handling of the audio signal, especially the audio musical signal. That said we are very fortunate these days that nearly everything sounds pretty damm good, even avr receivers, so many many folks start as you, with an AVR and some amps, frankly if you got a nice two channel amp you would be fine using the H&K for your surrounds but knock yourself out if you want a three channel as well, I would get a pre designed to play music with that dough, you could even just change the speaker wires as you switch back from music to HT if you wished, some do exactly that until they get a pre with HT by-pass.

Most of all enjoy yourself, trust your ears, they will tell you when to stop and be done, however, your free to join me anytime in the big audio Rabbit Hole, in fact you are already there, now you pick your path.

RT1