During my shopping I also looked at 3 channels amplifiers and I listened to the multi-3 from audio refinement (the cheaper brand of YBA) and I liked it enough that I decided this was a safer choice on how to spend money. So evidently the mult-3 now power my center and 2 surrond channels. When listening to a good DVD-A or SACD the 3 speakers are now much more clean sounding at very low volume or when playing loudly. My system as gain a lot in coherence and the sounstage from the back is much bigger. I am very happy
So this unit is branched at the pre-amp out of my ONKYO receiver and the "filtered" output goes to the 2 amps and the subwoofer. (The ICBM can recombine the extracted bass signals to the LFE channel, for people with big main they can also send the bass to the main, but in my case this is exactly what I did not want). It may seeme an extreme approach im a primarily "audiophile" system, but because of my QUAD ESL-63 I knew for a long time that I needed to protect them from bass signals they are not able to play.
The ICBM makes a huge improvement to my sound system when playing loud orchestral music with a lot of bass. A good example is the DVD-A recording of Mahler 8th. I got rid of all kind of "groans" in my QUADs, the bass is much better defined and I can play the system several db louder without the QUAD clipping.
As a bonus this makes playing movies soundtrack a lot easier. For example the passge in Return Of King where the ring is destroyed, now the Martin Logan Depth is having fun, and the Quads are not shutting down in protest.
I may have lost a tiny bit of transparency (this is hard to hear, but ideally I would be able to disconnect everything when listening to a string Quartet) but because of my setup this is really a great improvement for my overall system.
