My Adcom GFA-555 MKII popped/started smoking/went on fire internally, in no specific order last week. So I got a new amp while I was waiting for it to be repaired.
I tried the marantz on my old M22tis, it worked well. I didn't expect other. I tried it on the Thiel CS 3.6s I have with a bassy track, turned the settings to mid -3(not sure what frequency/bandwidth/amplitude the EQ knobs do yet), +2 treble, +1 bass, and loudness on, and turned it up until the hamper in my bathroom rattled enough for me to hear it in the listening room, and there was no distortion noticeable in the bass. The song was Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy. The Thiels are for the most part, 3 ohms and over 10 dB/watt/meter less sensitive than the m80s, and go down to 30 hz anechoically before dropping off.
The EQ on here has good center frequencies/Q - I want to find an analog spectrum analyzer and play a flat tone through it just to see what frequency and bandwidths it uses, because it's nice. It has the old fashioned loudness control that lowers the bass at a lesser rate than the rest of the audio when you lower the volume which is cool, but it also has a very natural sounding low end boost before you turn the volume down. It's the best basic EQ I've ever used.
I have a HK 3480 for my old M22ti system, a two channel, 120 wpc receiver. It was the same price refurbished and shipped, so I did a small comparison. The tone controls were much better on the marantz, they put the Q and center frequency just right on the EQ. "Loudness" beats vmax. Without tone controls the sound from both was identical, loud or not. However, the headphone jack on my HK was noisy, and the Marantz one was pretty quiet even with canalphones which was a pleasant surprise, since it's 35 years old.
Before I set the tone controls, I couldn't tell a difference between it and the adcom. The Adcom and the Marantz did sound noticeably different than a cheap used 5.1 yamaha receiver I used temporarily, which went into current limiting often before smoking one day.
You can find it a lot of the time on ebay for about $190 shipped. If it works for what I did to the thiels conditions, I think it'd be hard to get it to start clipping on the M80s.
I haven't got a chance to test the phono input stage yet, but I hope to soon!
If you're looking for a 2 channel system for music, and want something cheap between your cd player/turntable and speakers that won't go into current limiting/distortion under a 4 ohm load, I highly recommend this.
The one I bought was from 1971. I cleaned out the inside a bit and found a dead bug in the balance knob which explained why it needed to be at 9:00 to have an even soundstage. Nothing tweezers, q-tips, and alcohol couldn't fix.
