Good commercial amplifiers?

[jimangie1973]

There's a lot of talk on this forum about how most commercial amps are poorly designed with regard to stability, excess global negative feedback, etc. What are some of the quality commercial amplifiers? I never see any mention of the good ones. Thanks.

[el`Ol]

In my opinion the best speaker system is the Martion Orgon, a big buck four-way horn system with class A symmetric amplifiers from a backyard company in Berlin. A few years ago they had the following idea: Buy a bunch of cheap chinese pro amps and look what can be done with them. They ended up with a 200W/8Ohm and a 600W/8Ohm amp they sold for somewhere between 1000 and 2000 EUR (forgot the exact prices). Mr. Martion told me that everything that is expensive was already in the amps as they come from China. Soundwise they are somewhere between the really big stuff from Burmester and Electrocompaniet. Very stable, very neutral, and a bit on the soft side.

[DF96]

DIY Audio - the clue is in the title.

Many of us on here don't buy commercial amplifiers, although a few may design them.

Also, as you may have noticed, we can't even agree amongst ourselves what "good" means!

[Ian Finch]

I guess it takes a while to find and read all the relevant threads, but since people do vote with their wallets or soldering irons in this case, you soon see that there are popular old amps that people refer to time and again and give open tribute by cloning, modding etc in order to obtain, regain or enhance the audio magic they seek.

OTOH, you also get to see the ones that have issues, whenever newbies join the forum to sort out a misbehaving amp. Often there are a lot of informative comments posted by techs and pro. designers in these threads which are more telling than general opinion of the amplifier's merits.

The obvious forum based on this would be NP's with his many respected designs being discussed, cloned and reinvented continuously.
I should add that the engineering (the total specification for the construction of the amp and not simply the electronic schematic) is mostly the difference between the good ones and also-rans IMHO.