My Favorite Audio Amplifiers Reviewed

all right my friends we are back and you guys responded really well to that loudspeaker nostalgia video I just released the other day and I wanted to do something similar with amplifiers and basically kind of give you a historical perspective of when I started audio holics and I started getting serious about reviewing and measuring amplifiers and I was fortunate to own many of the amplifiers on this list I didn't measure every single one of them because I didn't have measurement capability right away but they still left a quite an incredible impression on me and I wanted to share some of this with you so we start out with the Eragon products which was also which is the high-end division of Acuras this is an American company years ago back in the 80s they were really dominant and maybe some of the 90s they're back now and they're under new direction but when they were first introduced to me they oh the owner was a Tony Federici really nice Italian just like me from New York he flew down to Florida just when I was starting audio holics and we met and we hit it off and became really good friends and I was fortunate that he brought down the Eragon soundstage processor and the 8008 5x5 amplifier and this picture does no justice this was a massive amplifier two feet deep it weighed over a hundred pounds five channels two in a watts times five all channels driven in at 8 ohms Borna watts times 5 into 4 ohms this was no-holds-barred you know the guy that designed this amplifier designed all of their amplifiers at the time including the Palladium series which were really high-end amplifiers for those that wanted to drive any speaker back in the day Cleveland like the apogee 's that would go down to like 2 ohms these things would do it this was just an incredible amplifier a huge power supply like a 2 kVA transformer two and a half K actually 150 thousand microfarads at the past and it's 12 output devices high current output devices per channel the only downside was the thing was 2 feet deep it was hard to put it in Iraq actually had to turn it sideways to fit it into my entertainment area I just knew I had to have this amplifier and this is why I started getting into the really high-end rvh speakers 1266 SCRs and they needed the power and they lit up with an amplifier like this and the amp also ran really hot so I actually had to pull the top off and just kind of lower the class-a bias it was a little bit too bias into Class A but the amplifier was just amazing measured great I only had like an oscilloscope at the time to measure this amplifier and the next sample for I'm going to talk about but what I did was I verified the power claims and these guys hid their power numbers which was great so the next amplifier we reviewed was a para sound halo the 8 to 1 and the a 5-1 and these were really potent amplifiers at the time they still are I mean they still make incredible amplifiers to this day and they've refreshed this this whole topology since then this was done by John curl these were another thing that just had tons of output devices I think this one had 40 output devices for a 5-channel amp huge power supply just like the Aragon one just excellent specs 250 watts times 5 for NAT watts time into 4 ohms times 5 and this is all channels driven this was no-nonsense these amplifiers would just truly state-of-the-art and I don't even know if I have pictures of it here but the cool thing about it was THX certified bridgeable I mean there was just so many different things you can do with this amplifier and I'm talking back in the day I just had only an oscilloscope and I was able to measure power and actually measure the output and penis just to show that this amplifier didn't change frequency response depending on the load it drove these are just excellent measuring amplifiers you can see here measured over its rated power format Watts 250 watts of the 4 8 ohms 400 - 4 ohms and more importantly these amplifiers just sounded amaze I mean you could really hear the difference when you were driving a really demanding speaker with an amplifier of this caliber and they were reasonably priced than me for what you were getting I think it was around four or five grand wasn't really like out of the world in terms of today's high-end audio and then it brings me to the next multi-channel amplifier from Integra research do you guys remember Integra research this was the high high-end division first you had Akio then you've had Integra like you do now but then you had Integra research and I really wish on Kia would bring this brand back I remember we went to CES show back in 2004 I think of 2005 and they debuted the Integra research RDA 7th RTC 7.1 processor a modular processor and then the RDA 7.1 amplifier these were state of the art man let me tell you something these things were beautiful I mean you just don't see these kind of build qualities and separates much often today they were beautiful they measured great I love this amplifier but it was a beast it was another one of those amplifiers this thing weighed 150 pounds packed 115 pounds unpacked and when they said 150 watts times eight and three minutes times four that was all channels driven again and I'd measure this and I verified this and the funny thing about this amplifier it was they marketed that was designed by balanced audio technologies and I was like I just I wasn't buying it I mean not that that b8e is a bad brand at all but they did mostly tube amps at the time and I could tell when I popped the top off of this thing it looked like it was an ATI amplifier so then they finally released a statement saying it was designed by balanced audio technologies produced by ATI but I honestly think it was a fully ATI amplifier just ATI didn't carry the clout that balanced audio is technology did and you can see the the picture here and you can see each amplifier had its own giant heatsink this looks very ATI to me so I never really pursued them that far to see but who made this amplifier but it looked very ATI to me but it doesn't matter the amplifier was just amazing it really sounded excellent the build quality was excellent I could show you some of the measurements that really got me like you could look at this FFT this is a really clean amplifier this was a full rated power and you could see the first harmonic I say second-order harmonic was still down about what was that about 80 something dB so it was really clean and yeah just measured great like this is at 1 watt and you're down in the blood here you down over 90 DB and this is the kind of stuff that you see in a good amplifier you don't see a lot of residual noise here and the power that this thing put out was just amazing like for seven channels was breaking the bank back then everything was pretty much five channel amplifiers back then so this is one of the first 7 channel amplifiers and I loved it I mean I wish I could have kept this amplifier it was out of my price range at the time I got to spend a month or two listening to it and I really enjoyed the sound quality and most importantly the aesthetics was just gorgeous so I kind of wish integra research would come back and and bring the brand back again because it was just a really special brand for anyone that owned it so then this brings me to en on Denon used to be my darling back when they used to make equipment like this and I had as you guys know I had the AV PA 1 HDC i-10 channel processor and then this was the matching 10 channel amplifier this was a very special series of product they just don't make separates like this anymore at least not they Japanese brands nothing is built to this caliber none of the Moran stuff today is built to this caliber none of the Yamaha stuff is built to this caliber this was special stuff in this state in my reference system for many years and I dumped it because I wanted to move on to Atmos but I shed a couple of Tears for this because this was just really special stuff this Denon amp was just mind-boggling and how it was built this broke my back this literally gave me herniated because the thing weighed 150 pounds and I've moved it myself up a flight of steps and I put it into my middle atlantic rack and stuck it in there and it killed me it literally broke my back I couldn't walk for like two days afterwards it was a beast it was a hundred and fifty watt 2-channel times ten or you could bridge every channel and get 300 watts times five and it was a 20 amp circuit on it so it would basically pull everything out of that wall that was capable of and it weighed 132 pounds and let me tell you the other cool thing about this amp was fully differential from input to output and so was the AVP processor everything was differential circuits from input to output so that cuts down on Distortion and this was one of the best measuring amps and I could probably show you and look how it came it came in a pallet I mean this is how they shipped it the amplifier in the processor was crazy let me see if I could show you the measurements here so yeah here's the bandwidth of it it was you know well beyond audibility the three DB point was like a hundred kilohertz or something like that and this is back I had the really good audio precision back then that could measure very low noise but I recently changed it to the a px 585 because I wanted an HDMI capability but this was this thing really pushed the limits of distortion really clean we're talking very low distortion a this is a power sweep then I kept the distortion under point zero one percent for the entire bandwidth and it was flat all the way up to 20 K I mean this is just incredible and you could see it was putting out 300 watts in the four ohms and then when I bridged it into four ohms which it wasn't even rated to go down that much I got over four hundred and twenty-five Watts supposed to be about five hundred watts I think but it was pretty close but this thing was just a beaut look at that look at that Distortion really clean this is at full rated power again we're at like minus 90 DB for the fundamentals here for the distortion for the second harmonic harmonic I mean this is just stayed in your kind of performance this is in bridge mode so it's even cleaner I mean it's just uh I miss amplifiers like this this was a great amp the only time I saw it reach its limits is when I tried to power my status ain't T's when I got those this was a little bit that speaker was a little bit too much for this amplifier because my speakers dip down to 2 ohms and when you bridge an amplifier it sees half the load impedance so now that 4 ohm amplifier is seen to own load and it was a law for at the handle so it was great to run this amplifier on the highs but when I try to run the bass it did just didn't drive it as well and that's when I came across Class A and this amplifier let me tell you 6,500 bucks to channel amp with there I see tunnel which really kept the amp running cool all the time I wasn't too familiar with the Class A brand and then when someone told me I should check this out I was very pleasantly surprised when I did this was probably one of the best measuring amplifiers to Jenna lamps that I've ever seen it was a beast it was rated I think it I don't even remember the rating now I think it was like 300 watts yeah 300 to 800 m 6 hundred at the 4 ohms so it was definitely more powerful than a Denon and it just drove my speaker's very happily in fact I had a past labs amp at the same time as I had this amplifier this was a 6500 all our amp which I thought was expensive but the past lab amp was twice as much the x3 50.5 this amplifier measured better than the past labs and it sounded better and I could show you the measurements here this is another thing that was just truly state-of-the-art the noise floor was excellent I mean at 1 watt this thing was only putting out 94 DB SNR which anything better than 88 DB is like state-of-the-art in my opinion this thing was super low noise at minus 94 DB excellent frequency response really flat really beautiful way past the audio band and you can see here's the interesting thing you look at the power versus distortion curve on this a lot of the times when you look at this you see an amplifier just kind of go you know and start raising up this thing was flat all the way past it's 300 watt rating look at how flat it is and this is really a 350 watt amplifier they were just conservatively rating it and then it just clips over here and this is just a beautiful power versus distortion curve and I've seen some doozies in the past like just go crazy when you start getting into clipping but this was just a really linear amplifier put out tons of power tons of dynamic power I ran a burst test on this thing it was putting out over seven hundred and sixty watts just the excellent sounding amp look at the distortion at one watt I mean it was basically at the noise floor here really clean amplifier even when it was at full bit full power it was really a state of the art in every aspect and it was a great sounding amp and I was fortunate to actually use this amplifier in my system for a good year before I actually sent it back so this brings me to the next amplifier and this I have to say the e motiva XP r1 was probably my all-time favorite amp it really was a mono block that emote Eva came out with it was one kilowatt into a Tom's like 1.7 kilowatts into 4 ohms and really it could do 2 kilowatts if you did a 220 volt on it so it would run at 220 volts it had a class H topology so it was a kind of a sliding rail when when it would go to high power to go to the high rails when it was at the lower power it be a Class A B bias at the lower rails this thing was really something special for me motiva and I wish they beat they made something like this now I know they have the the XDA series now and they use an SMPS power supply instead of the linear power supply but and I haven't tested that one but I know it doesn't have quite as much power as this this was a beast it was a hundred pounds per channel and we were requires a 20-amp line so you're really needed to use a 20-amp line and they did some clever stuff here with their power supply you can see this is hope these two heat sinks is just for one channel this is one channel the power supply in this amplifier was bigger than the one that was in the $11,000 past labs amp I know emote even lost money on this amplifier there's no doubt about it this thing was very expensive to produce very expensive to service and that was the Achilles heel is when this amplifier finally failed on me you know unfortunately they weren't servicing them so I basically had to sell the one unit that I had remaining and then dumped the other one and it broke my heart because I loved this amplifier there was nothing that measured as much power as this and it sounded excellent I mean II motiva had a semi special resistors just to measure this thing those are giant ceramic resistors and I had a used two of those because I had to do one for 8 ohms and then I had to do two of them in parallel for 4 ohms and let me show you some power numbers I got here this is the real deal and you can see it's really clean too this is a 91 DB SNR at 1 watt 121 at 1 kilowatt so this this amplifier was really quiet nice flat frequency response and just the power you know here's where you can see the switchover not something that's really audible but it was a very clever design you could see the distortion got higher when you were in the class H the high rail but still below 0.01 and we're talking about 1200 Watts here that's a lot of power to have and my speakers just loved it and you can see here dynamic power too so I got 1500 watts I got 4 ohms I got almost 3 kilowatts of power it was crazy and here's the power table like I did all the measurements on so yeah this is the most powerful amplifier I've ever measured it never ran hot that was the cool thing about it is it was just a very efficient design even though it was a linear design and look at the distortion at 1 watt this thing was clean clean clean no harmonics here this was just amazing and even at high power this thing was pretty clean you know there were some residuals here but we're at over a kilowatt of power this thing just was awesome amplifier I really missed this amplifier this was probably the highlight of amplifiers that I had in my system but you know it only lasted for five years so I had to move on and that's when I contacted anthem and I got there Str separates and I love these separates man let me tell you something guys for a two-channel the phono preamp on this str preamp is just amazing measures great the analog preamp is excellent the analog to digital converters are really good a lot of times you get some of these processors today and they gave you good Dax but they gave me terrible analog to digital converters not anthem you can look at my measurements this thing was truly state of the art and then the STR amplifier wasn't as powerful as the emotive amplifier but it still drove my speakers without any issues and this thing has dual heat sinks per channel so it was a bridged amplifier basically had balanced the outputs on it two nice big toroid beautiful beautiful build quality this amp is quiet it's clean it's reliable I've had it in my system now since I don't know I reviewed this back in 2000 and thought it reviewed a way before 2018 but anyways I've had it in my system at least two years it's been flawless and I could show you some of the measurements on it here look how clean the est are pre out is just so you can see just a beautiful measuring product I love products that sound good and measure good as well so if you look at I'm still in the preamp section I want to show you the power amps so yeah this is another amplifier that just has a really good power versus distortion curve putting out some good power there I got 493 watts at 1% distortion at 8 ohms and it was rated to 800 watts momentarily into 2 ohms and 600 watts into 4 ohms and I still got I got 671 watts at 0.01% and 700 watts per channel this is two channels driven guys this is a lot of power for an amplifier that only weighs 50 or 60 pounds this is a lot of power per square inch and even the power dynamic burst test I got over a kilowatt of power that's a lot of power and this thing is really easy to light lightweight to pick up I mean I just good measurements really here here's what I was talking about so the FFT had 1 watt is super super clean these residuals are really down in the mud yeah this is great amplifier so that's one of my faves right there good sounding amp and it looks great I love the TFT display on it the power meter and this this system just works great especially with the marantz turntable so those are some of my favorite amplifiers I'm kind of curious as to know what are your favorite amplifiers that you've had in your system these are not all the amplifiers have ever experienced I love some of the older work tell amplifiers that I've played with there's been so many different amps in my systems I just haven't had a chance to measure every amplifier that I've listened to but there's so many good products out there these are just highlights of some of the best ones that we were fortunate enough to review to measure to listen to and kind of curious about your experiences what are your favorite amplifiers is Class D your future because Class D is my future I've been moving over to Class D now I'm using a Pascal module to power the new or vh SVT RS system and I'm gonna be talking more about that in the future so guys don't forget to thumb this video up share it please don't forget about our patreon at patreon.com slash audio holics we've put a lot of unique content there that you don't get on the YouTube channel right away here plus you could go in there and chat with me I can answer some questions you can give me some video topics just a lot of perks there so guys I appreciate your time and I hope everybody enjoyed this video and until next time my friends keep listening

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 92,519

Rating: 4.883182 out of 5

Keywords: audioholics, video review, home theater, audiophile, tech, headphones, speakers, amplifier, movies, music, audio, video, projection, bass, subwoofer, hdtv, blu-ray, dolby, atmos

Id: jJ8PosPLbMQ

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020