|
If you're going to go old school, go Old School.
My receiver is a Marantz 2325, *completely* restored. My father bought it new in 1976 and then stored it when it had a component failure about 20 years later. He eventually gifted it to me and I waited over two years to have a very, very, VERY OCD Marantz expert restore it to better than new condition-- we used the best of everything on any replacement components.
Fun fact about the Marantz of that era. The 2325 is spec'd at 125 W/channel at 8 ohms. But what really happened is that Marantz would take a random sampling of their receivers, bench test them for days, and where the first one started to clip, that's what they rated the power output as. In other words-- they're *monstrously* overpowered. When we bench tested mine, it ran continuously at about 165W/ channel-- and that's RMS, not peak. When I turn the receiver on, the lights in the room literally dim for a couple of seconds-- the capacitors in that beast are the size of coke cans.
My speakers are a pair of KEF Reference Series 104/2's that I've completely refurbished (new speaker surrounds, rebuilt ferrofluid tweets, rebuilt w/ matching crossover components, etc. They're like most high-end speakers from the '80's- they need a *lot* of power to do them justice.
I used to run them with a variety of modern Yamaha receivers and they sounded fine, but the first time I fired them up using the Marantz, I almost cried-- I heard things I'd *never* heard before on a bunch of audio tracks I use for reference (Adele, Sarah McLachlan, Boston, Roxy Music).
It's a combination made in heaven, and the fact that the components have a personal history with me makes it even better.
R.
|