[javadog]

I think I would suggest going with newer, higher quality equipment. Some of those old receivers were pretty decent, for their day, but time has marched on. I’m somewhat convinced that half of their appeal is just nostalgia.

You say your budget is five grand or thereabouts. It would buy a whole bunch of different things. As a data point, before I moved last year, I sold one of my systems because I didn’t need three of them and I didn’t want to have to screw with moving it. I sold a pair of Krell FPB 250 monoblocks (250W each) and a Krell KPS 20il CD player that would drive the amps directly, for $5000. I sold a pair of Transparent interconnect cables and a pair of Transparent speaker cables for another $500. That combination will absolutely smoke any old receiver, I don’t care how you feed it. It might be able to be purchased for less than what I got for it when I sold it, which was two or three years ago.

If you look nationally and are patient you can pick up a set of Energy Veritas V2.8 speakers for about $1500-$1600. Those speakers aren’t well-known but they retailed for about $6500 in the 1990s, the street price if you knew somebody was around four grand and they were a full range speaker with a class A rating from Stereophile. Kind of a sleeper and huge bang for the buck.

There are other combinations you can try and put together, that’s just one that I’m familiar with from personal use.

The other consideration is the room you’re going to put it in. That’ll have a bigger impact than you realize, and if you really want a good sound, you’re not going to get it if it’s a multi-use room with a lot of other crap in it. That’s what most of us are faced with, but room acoustics are a complicated subject and few rooms are well suited to two channel reproduction. There are a bunch of videos on the Internet that she can watch to learn more about acoustics on how to avoid problems and fix the ones you can avoid, so long as the wife looks the other way. To get started check out the videos on YouTube from a company called Acoustic Fields.