B&W 603s sounding there best, need advice

[Woochifer]

Speaker and/or amplification upgrades can help, but I would take a step back and first optimize your existing setup. Any deficiencies you have with the alignment, acoustical conditions, and the room placement will still be there even with hardware upgrades.

If you plant to keep your setup as a two-channel system, you should try pulling out the speakers from the wall and experiment with the alignment and the toe-in angles, as well as how far from the speakers you sit. The stereo imaging effect can change a lot with how wide or narrow an angle you use, and the toe-in angle can affect the tonal characteristics depending on if you choose to point the speakers straight ahead or more directed towards the listening position.

Another thing you should check on is the acoustical conditions. A highly reflective room will create time domain distortions that make the sound seem harsher, whereas an overly absorptive room can make the music sound dead. Most rooms are overly reflective, and you can check this by simply standing in the middle of the room and clapping your hands together. If you hear that reverberating "slap echo" then you have an acoustical problem. You can remedy this by using thick rugs or putting more cushy furniture in the room. You can also hang wall tapestries at the reflecting points to absorb the sound waves that bounce off the walls. Another approach would be to diffuse the sound by putting bookcases (with a lot of books of different sizes) at the back of the room or along the side walls to break up the soundwaves.

The low frequencies especially will vary significantly from location to location within your room. You could try repositioning the speakers to try and find a location with the most even-sounding bass.

This type of tweaking and adjusting can optimize your existing system, while setting you up for any hardware upgrades you might want to do. In general, I think it's premature to ponder buying new equipment before you even try to optimize your existing setup.

[E-Stat]

Speaker and/or amplification upgrades can help, but I would take a step back and first optimize your existing setup. Any deficiencies you have with the alignment, acoustical conditions, and the room placement will still be there even with hardware upgrades.

Test only --

rw

[SlumpBuster]

You can remedy this by using thick rugs or putting more cushy furniture in the room.

And how! All of Woochifer's advice is good, but I got new furniture for my room a couple weeks ago that is much larger and plusher then what was there. It made a huge improvement in sound.

Something that I was always skeptical about too, until I tried it was a separate amp. You can get great Rotels, Adcoms, and Nads on ebay for $150 to$500 depending on what they are. It doesn't even have to be fancy, you can get 100 quality watts for $100 if you look for vintage japanese that will blow the doors of most anything from a bigbox retailer.

[RGA]

The B&W 600 line is not power hungry. Better amps sound better with the 600s because the amps sound better -- more power is not necessary. Less but good power can be a revelation. If you can try amplifiers from Audio Refinement and Linn -- both may well be under 50 watts. And if you have the money the Sugden A21a.

I agree with Woochifer on the room and I also agree that Rotel makes some nice units.

[Resident Loser]

Speaker and/or amplification upgrades can help, but I would take a step back and first optimize your existing setup. Any deficiencies you have with the alignment, acoustical conditions, and the room placement will still be there even with hardware upgrades.

If you plant to keep your setup as a two-channel system, you should try pulling out the speakers from the wall and experiment with the alignment and the toe-in angles, as well as how far from the speakers you sit. The stereo imaging effect can change a lot with how wide or narrow an angle you use, and the toe-in angle can affect the tonal characteristics depending on if you choose to point the speakers straight ahead or more directed towards the listening position.

Another thing you should check on is the acoustical conditions. A highly reflective room will create time domain distortions that make the sound seem harsher, whereas an overly absorptive room can make the music sound dead. Most rooms are overly reflective, and you can check this by simply standing in the middle of the room and clapping your hands together. If you hear that reverberating "slap echo" then you have an acoustical problem. You can remedy this by using thick rugs or putting more cushy furniture in the room. You can also hang wall tapestries at the reflecting points to absorb the sound waves that bounce off the walls. Another approach would be to diffuse the sound by putting bookcases (with a lot of books of different sizes) at the back of the room or along the side walls to break up the soundwaves.

The low frequencies especially will vary significantly from location to location within your room. You could try repositioning the speakers to try and find a location with the most even-sounding bass.

This type of tweaking and adjusting can optimize your existing system, while setting you up for any hardware upgrades you might want to do. In general, I think it's premature to ponder buying new equipment before you even try to optimize your existing setup.

...I was laying the groundwork for with my EQ inquiry...

If the EQ is being used incorrectly as a tone control/gain stage, it could actually be doing more harm than good...

As you suggest, the OP needs to optimize the loudspeaker/room synergy (w/o the EQ) with placement and room treatment...There is really no reason to deep-six any existing gear until these most basic issues are sorted out.

Once they are dealt with, even if another amp is substituted, the baseline for the loudspeaker positioning will have been arrived at...Of course if the speakers are changed it's back to square one...

And an additional question for the OP...how is the EQ connected into your system? Is it being used to modify a single source or the entire system? Given the fact that the Sony seems to be a multi-ch/HT unit, (and they usually tend leave a lot to be desired, connectivity-wise) I am quite curious...

jimHJJ(...make that very curious...)