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3 Sad Bastards

Tony L said:
LOL! An incomplete list of UK amps I’d take in a heartbeat over anything by MF: Any vintage valve Leak, Radford, Quad, Armstrong, Beam Echo or Rogers. Any class A Sugden. Chrome-bumper/Vereker-era Naim 160, 250 or 135s. Any Farlow-era Exposure. Anything by EAR, Croft or Tron. And my trusty Quad 303!

PS As ever, if I wanted a MF P470 or NuVista (the latter being one of the most lifeless amps I’ve ever heard, one of the ugliest too) there would be one sitting in the front room!
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Many excellent brands yes but many for nostalgic, vintage reasons, and others for VFM and reliability reasons but nothing you've named other than some EAR can come close to the best MF amps for ultimate performance and none have tried to! No other UK company has even tried to match the likes of Levinson, Krell etc in building "super/muscle amps" at very high prices to drive the best most expensive speakers available etc. MF don't come close in build quality to these but they do rival them in SQ.
I have many reasons to dislike AM but at least he had the balls to think beyond yet another UK made generic 70WPC shoebox and "aim for the stars"!... and hired the great TdP to design many of the older models! Pity he was too tight to take a bit less profit and spend it on the build and reliability... time will tell how the new owners do on this...

The NuVista 300 is possibly the best amp I've ever heard (there are rivals for this) and "Stereophile" agreed with me and said it was the best power amp they had ever heard in the review.
 
I tried to listen to it but I was overcome by a strong urge to fall asleep. Which I decided was the more fruitful option.
 
I dunno, I didn't think it was that bad. Can't be too different to having your computer read aloud the pages of this forum but without the insults.

I didn't feel like listening to music, I heard about podcasts on Spotify and decided to give it a go. I was cleaning my bike and just had it on the headphones so wasn't critically listening or anything.

It's just the conviction the Sanders guy had about the need for 500w amp was really scary when it does appear to be total BS as backed up by the comments made here.
 
To be fair, if you want genuinely realistic levels, from speakers that can do it and take the power and in a fairly large room, you will indeed need 500WPC... and possibly a lot more!

We may think we play our hi fi pretty loud but a live rock band in a pub (remember that!??) with the usual Marshall guitar amps on lead and rhythm guitar, 500W+ bass guitar amp all through prob 97dB/W speakers, live drum kit, and all going through a pretty normal these days 5KW PA system soon re-educates as to what loud really is.

For the volumes that most of us want/can get away with in our living rooms though you don't need anywhere near that much power. I find 10WPC adequate here.
 
True, but you only need to do it with quality once, as after that you have permanent hearing damage so can get away with some crappy 1kW rack PA amp!

PS Speaking as someone who owned a 4x12” and played gigs all over the country through fairly substantial PAs in clubs, student unions etc I’ll just point out I never did it without ear plugs! In fact it is only the very first gigs I went to as a teenager where I didn’t, and I regret that. I’m sure I’d have more HF left now if I had. A lot of rock music is way too loud even with plugs. I have a lot of deaf friends...
 
Arkless Electronics said:
To be fair, if you want genuinely realistic levels, from speakers that can do it and take the power and in a fairly large room, you will indeed need 500WPC... and possibly a lot more!

We may think we play our hi fi pretty loud but a live rock band in a pub (remember that!??) with the usual Marshall guitar amps on lead and rhythm guitar, 500W+ bass guitar amp all through prob 97dB/W speakers, live drum kit, and all going through a pretty normal these days 5KW PA system soon re-educates as to what loud really is.

For the volumes that most of us want/can get away with in our living rooms though you don't need anywhere near that much power. I find 10WPC adequate here.
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And let's not forget that the typical UK sitting room is the size of a US bathroom...
 
What’s the size of the typical UK shitting room?

Joe
 
Reliability is really important to the end user. Amps not going up in smoke & taking potentially expensive speakers with them is a really good thing.

The odd MF amp I’ve heard has never overly impressed me but we al like different things.
 
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