Receivers such as the Yamaha RX-Z9 sound fantastic, and its only when you get into the esoteric stuff that the performance gap increases. Todays top receivers have enormous power supplies and utilize high-quality components throughout. These super receivers sound very transparent, clean, and well-balanced, with excellent extension at both frequency extremes. Good depth and width as well as decent seperation of stereo images (not homogenized) mean that the top receivers can be used without apology for serious music listening both in two-channel and multi-channel. There are some real advantages to an integrated solution and the most compelling is the shorter signal path. Cables are greatly shortened or in some cases eliminated. The other important advantage here is the integration of the DAC, so now we can have the signal running from source as digital processed at 192 and then converted to analogue all without much signal degradation. This in addition to the excellent radio recievers included in today's top receivers. I would question some of the opinions on some focus groups that older receivers easily outperform these new top recievers as it has been my experience that this is not the case.

But there are some areas where to my ears the best seperates are in a different class, such as the area of dynamics, solidity, dimensionality, expressiveness, textural and tonal complexity and a sense of thereness or aliveness. But again, you've got to get into the really good stuff to pull away from the top recievers of today,