The secret to economically improving your audio system is pretty simple. Identify and replace the worse case problem in the chain first.
The worse case problem may be your room acoustics, your speakers, your amplifier, your preamplifier, your DAC, your CD player, maybe even your cables, and not all that unusual, your choice of music, artists, and recording quality.
Far too many people go off on a wrong tangent fixing the wrong thing and overlooking the worse case problem, with expensive and not very satisfactory results.
For example, the desire for "better bass" usually send people looking for bigger speakers and/or a subwoofer. However, if your amp, preamp, and/or DAC do not actually play back clean and powerful deep bass well, then all the subwoofers in the world won't help much.
If changing interconnect cables or speaker wires makes a obvious difference, this should be a red flag that something in your system is excessively load sensitive, not a good thing. Just having a decent audio tech armed with a sine/square wave generator, load bank, and scope can help you root out many easy to identify problems for a lot lower cost that just starting to replace things or cables randomly.
Would a power amp be your best starting point? I could not answer that now without a better understanding of the way your system actually works in your room now, and without the information to try and discover the real worst case problem now.
Best regards,
Frank Van Alstine
