What price point favors separates over integrated?

There is no price, or real reason why one must be better than the other IMO, separates offer advantages of mix and match which opens up a lot of doors towards getting exactly the sound you are after. Both can be built to any price or quality level the designer may have the skills to implement.

Dave

I guess it all depends on your money situation, because separates have more extra cost associated with them.

For example, I just went to mono-blocks. Now I have a pre-amp and two amps.

My power cords cost $550.00 a piece and interconnects cost $500.00 a pair. So an integrated would need one power cord, where I need three and a set of interconnects. So the pre-amp/mono-block set up cost an extra $1,600.00 in cables.

I also need three spaces in my rack for them instead of just one, as well as three outlets instead of just one.

The main reason that I like separates is because I have played music all of my life, and I have the audiophile 'addiction', and continually change trying to hear more and more.

Thanks, Krell man. It's all that additional cost in cords, interconnects, and boxes that I'm wondering about. This additional cost seems to argue heavily in favor of an integrated -- even at, say $5K. You like Musical Fidelity amps. (I do too. They've got a really sweet sound.) Why not the A5 or KW500? That extra $1600 in cables could buy a lot more power in an integrated.

Of course, you couldn't fiddle with the two separately. I get that. But I'm guessing at some price point, the advantages of separates/monoblocks outweigh the disadvantages of all of those extra boxes and cables.

There are additional benefits to separates, that may or may not be audible to all listeners, such as separation of power supplies in the power and pre, less crosstalk between co-mingled audio circuitry (that's debatable), and fewer heat dissipation concerns, since you are theoretically cramming less stuff into a chassis. That being said, some of the ultra-high end integrateds avoid these issues by being large, housing power supplies in separate chassis, or using new switch mode amp topologies, which run more effifintly and therefore have fewer heat dissipation issues. I own the Musical Fidelity kW500, which is similar to the big ASR integrateds in that they offload the PSU in another box. Of course this level of design takes away two of the more obvious beneftis of integrated design - small chassis and thus lower price. To me it is worth it, but I wouldn't bet the farm that I could tell the difference between the A5 and the kW500 in a DBT...