Just won a bargain HK6550 and looking for advice on matching it

[bemaniac]

Just won a Harmon HK6550 for just £106 mint and wondered how well this will go with my ms904s as I am using a marantz pm-66se ki at the moment and find the sound not to have the speed and control (can I call it attack?) I want on the lower end and used to have with smaller speakers like wharfedale diamond 7s and 8s. Also and more importantly I wish to biwire now and this amp has 8 posts so please recommend a 2nd hand pair of speaker cables I can pick up for the £50 mark thanks!

 

[bemaniac]

i got qed silver anniversary xt biwire 1.5m x2 in the end

 

[Tonestar1]

Might be worth trying using both a and b terminals and bi-amping just to see if it offers any improvement. You'll never know until you try.

 

[bemaniac]

this amp just turned up and i've put on a playlist of all my fave stuff and i'm basically sitting here with my mouth open. I've never heard anything like the complete utter 100% change in my sound thru the 904s i quite simply can't wait for my biwire cable to turn up this is astonishing the lows and highs being uncovered and the sheer muscle and speed this amp has is scary! I thought the pm66-se ki was really good but this is a totally different class. how have more people not experienced this amp?

 

[the record spot]

Simple mate; it's not NAD, Arcam, Marantz, Rotel or any of the usual suspects and even back in the 1990s when the HK610, etc. was out, the 6550 wasn't huge from memory yet their amps were easily the equal but hey, you got yours for a bargain price and a good one at that.

 

[bemaniac]

I was basically trying hard to find the sansui amps and i found this as my stop-gap and the power from the high current touted in this amps specs is enough to positively grip the mid cones and give them a good firm shake. The best thing so far is the fact that delicate lyrics like Something corporates konstantine really show clarity even at room shattering volumes. I'm sure some of this is the inital euphoria of new stuff so i'll probably post once I've had an extended listen for unbiased audio creaming 🙂

 

[the record spot]

Sound find - was thinking about getting one of those from the German Ebay site a couple of years back; decided that might be too risky/expensive and I got the 717 in January this year. But you won't go wrong with the HK stuff.

 

[Anonymous]

Tonestar1:Might be worth trying using both a and b terminals and bi-amping just to see if it offers any improvement. You'll never know until you try.

Interesting , didnt know this was possible ,, So the A terminals would go to the left speaker say and B terminals to the right speaker ?

Anyone try this before ?

 

[bemaniac]

presumably when the cable turns up i'll be trying A terminals for low freq and B terminals for hi freq rather than A left B right else might end up with 2 different sounds 🙂

 

[Anonymous]

dont you need two amps for bi-amping ??

 

[bemaniac]

Yes afaik but doing this is going to be easier to wire its not biamping tho its biwiring.

 

[Dave_]

Tonestar1:Might be worth trying using both a and b terminals and bi-amping just to see if it offers any improvement. You'll never know until you try.You mean bi-wiring...

 

[Tonestar1]

No i meant bi-amping if amp has two zones. Turn on both A &B outputs. wire tweeters to zone B and woofer to zone A. Will be less power to each but may work out ok. I used to do this with my old 90s technics amp though that was a beast. Showed, what I thought was, an improvement over doubling the wires up on the A speaker output. Not saying it will work wonders but is defo worth a punt for a free upgrade.

edit I'm removing the "significant" from my improvement comments. I just thought It sounded better.

 

[bemaniac]

I've got the xt biwire cable now and it's all pushed into the binding posts for A as couldnt get it to work properly with A + B and it sounded too thuddy like the tweeters weren't even connected even tho i switched amp to A+B mode.

The sound has picked up loads from original 2 wire silver anniversary cables and the bass is powerful in biwire mode but still not losing the treble which used to happen quite a lot on heavy drum n bass tracks. Overall this is the best upgrade i've bought for the system so far and i'll be upgrading the source next month.