Shakeydeal

If five watts isn't party level loud, I wouldn't trust those meters.

Rugs on the floor and some heavy blackout curtains too.

That room will need some serious attention. Reminds me of about 25 years ago. I broke up with my girlfriend and moved into a new house. It had a large 26 X 16 room with suspended hardwood floors. All I had was a loveseat and my equipment and rack. Looked very similar to your room. The first time I fired the system up I cringed at the sound. I knew I had work to do.

This is a wonderful way for someone to dip their toes in the 300B waters and see what it’s all about. GLWS.

This is some good reading for you. https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/Intro/SQ/VolumeControl.htm

Using a volume control in the digital domain throws away bits. Just sayin….

Well if you’ve never heard it done right, I guess you wouldn’t know…

Yeah, Bluetooth is a no no…

All I see is two question marks….

Qobuz or Tidal

Even though I haven’t heard the Emotiva, I’ve lived with other much higher quality SS amps and moved on. I’m not even slightly interested in that kind of sound since I am firmly in the tube camp. But I don’t think Emotiva would ever be on my radar if I had a use for a solid state amp. And with heritage klipsch speakers there is no need for high power behemoths, no matter the cost.

Congrats and welcome to the forum.

Well think about it. A receiver that includes a preamp, amplifier, tuner, AND a DAC (and a processor?) can't devote a lot of quality to any one of those. Compromises will be made.

I’m not a receiver expert or fan for that matter. But I would think there is a direct output that bypasses the onboard dac.

I was using an Allo Digi One pi player when I decided to try a blusound node. Both being used with an external dac. The user interface of the bluos app was much better, but I thought sound quality suffered a little. I moved on to a Lumin U1 mini and it is better than both. YMMV…..

I hope you aren’t alluding that the DAC in a computer is as good as an outboard dac?

Good on ya for moving the tv out of the room. You’ll definitely notice an improvement on that for sure.

Granted my experience with a laptop was many years ago. At the time I thought it sounded pretty good. But as usual, better is the enemy of the good. I think sometimes in this hobby people expect improvements to be on the same scale as tuning a boosted car. You'll certainly notice 150 more hp at the wheel. Whereas with audio upgrades, differences are more subtle. So it comes down to whether or not you want to spend an extra 5K to get that next 5 or 10% improvement. Now in your case it's somewhat the reverse. You have a 5K laptop and find it hard to imagine something much cheaper could even be even as good, much less better. Only you can say if this could be the case or not. I just know my Lumin sounds better than any laptop I've experienced.

This.......

Because a raspberry pi has one job and only one job to do. Stream your music. No background processes or other programs running. It also has a better output stage with less jitter and noise. It’s not going to be a huge leap going from one to the other but it will be noticeable. Things get better when you move up the streamer chain.

Oh, ok. AK6 might work. I was thinking earlier versions.

Not with khorns. You will be locked into one position, for better or worse.

Kind of a narrow room for khorns. You will be sitting way off axis with the speakers crossing well in front of the listening position. Just my opinon.

Use a laptop into a DAC if sound quality is only marginally important. Use the DAC in a laptop if you really don't like music at all and just want some noise in the background. Choices, choices......

Streamers are so cheap these days so there's no reason not to use one and stream lossless content like Tidal or Qobuz.