Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
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!
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.