What should I upgrade?

Wow! I want to thank everyone for their advice. It sure is appreciated!

Re: Cables

Kimber Kable 4vs (15ft pair) for speakers (banana plugs).
Kimber Kable Timbre XLR interconnects (amp to dac).
Wireworld USB
Van den hul toslink.

Any reccommendations for speaker cable that will increase the bass??

well, a quick check shows that the 4vs are 13awg, maybe someone who knows maggies can speak to how they react to different cables?

my martin logans are not as sensitive as other speakers in terms of bass response because the panel doesn't go too low (so thin cables can carry the frequencies that it reproduces fine), but your maggies are supposed to go down to 40, so i would think a cable of 8 to 10 awg MIGHT make a difference, although i don't have any experience with that. my gallos react differently with ever cable i've tried on them, for example.

i'm sure that the kimbers are good cables, though, so if you haven't tried any aftermarket power cables, i would drop $50 on one to put somewhere in your system to see what that does. "my audio cables", element, and signal are all companies that have an audiogon presence and make great, inexpensive cables. for what it's worth, after i put a good power cable on my ps1 cd player, i had to turn the bass down on the back of my speakers (logans have powered cone woofers).

Dcrugby- What power cables did you purchase?

Is it possible to bridge my s300 so it outputs 600w and buy another s300 to bridge? If so, how does one "bridge" an amp?

Is it possible to bridge my s300 so it outputs 600w and buy another s300 to bridge? If so, how does one "bridge" an amp?

Hi Devon,

No, a fully balanced stereo amplifier such as yours can in a sense be thought of as being two amplifiers on a single chassis, each of which is already bridged. By that I mean that each channel contains two amplifiers, one of which amplifies a signal that is inverted in phase relative to the signal being processed by the other amplifier, with the speaker being connected between the "hot" outputs of the two amplifiers. That results in twice as much voltage appearing across the speaker, relative to what a single-ended (unbalanced) amplifier with otherwise identical characteristics would provide.

So bridging a single speaker between one of the output terminals of one channel and one of the output terminals of the other channel, with the inputs to the two channels wired out-of-phase relative to each other, would not result in any added power capability.

Also, fyi, bridging results in the amplifier seeing the speaker impedance divided by two, so your nominally 4 ohm speakers would be seen as 2 ohms, which many amplifiers cannot handle. A major reason that Bel Canto specifies a 4 ohm minimum speaker impedance for your amplifier figures to be that the factor of 2 applies in the case of fully balanced operation as well.

Regards,
-- Al