Kap, I long ago realized that "you get what you pay for" was simply a slogan contrived by sellers of high-priced goods or services who had no objective way to justify themselves. It has no more reality in audio than anywhere else and specifically relating to amplification, the great thing about the present scene isn't multi-thousand dollar receivers or separate units, but rather the excellent quality available to us in units priced at a few hundred dollars. Transparent amplification(flat frequency response from 20Hz-20KHz, with inaudibly low noise and distortion)is all that's possible and throwing more money at the issue can't change that. Controlled blind listening tests show that when the labels and price tags disappear so do the alleged sound differences which were previously described in extravagant terms("huge", "night-and-day", "blows away", etc.).
