The Best Amp for the Price of Dirt

I have a good friend who understands audio circuits better than most of us know the image of our hands & faces. I have observed him to understand & doctument the history of any particular electronic circuit to its orgins; nothing (in electronics) seens to escape his mind-set.

Armed with 60-80 year old manuals pencil & paper Gary ,devoted 30+ years of research & study to circuits measuring and applying time honored mathamatical formula's to a collection of tube amps (50+ pairs in total). Never one to just leave an error in a circuit , Gary applied his knowledge to a "Hall of Fame" of amps ; each sounding more breathtaking following revision, be that an intentional or error(s) of omission by the initial designer(s).These revisions he applied one at a time until the finished unit was(to my ears and others)a work of art. Those efforts out-stripped any re-worked products hyped in the aura of "Best-Much Better in Audio Land". He is sucessful due to an understanding of the components that make up a circuit , its tolerances , limits and improvement far removed from the cap-changing crowd. That understanding is so fluid that when exchanging ideas with someone like Lew Johnson or others they appeared to express amazement having met someone who understood a product as well or better than they.

Moreover, from our friendship I learned the importance of design , execution and manufacture as touch-stones of what makes a product Ok vs a Classic . Price rarely reflects value , and value may become even more important today as we have endured historic price rises .

The A-500's are not exactly classics , nor are they Ok but they are quite a value for the $.

R: I guess you are an eqaphobiac. Do you play your LPs with a flat microphone preamp so as to avoid that nasty RIAA equalization? (By the way you might try it. Seriously, you might find the result interesting). And how do you identify recordings that have not been equalized during production?

And now for your button...Bose, Bose, Bose :-)
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LOL- I was thinking about RIAA EQ right after I sent that post(pretty sharp E, KUDOS). Nope, I've never tried the mic pre trick. Some EQ(like what goes on in a phono stage or in production) is an unavoidable evil. Curving venues was always a pain with the old Ivey RTA, and either a graphic or pararmetric EQ. When the UltraCurve Pro 8024 came along: whatta relief! At home I WAS an EQaphobe(any freq. over 80hz)for better than 24 years(80-04), and a DIGIphobe for 15 years(pretty much a straight-wire-with-gain, bi-amping, analog lover. Now I've got a TacT RCS 2.2X in my system(talk about a paradigm shift). OH NO, NOT BOSE!!(in my best Mr Bill voice)

Quandary : Has this bus fallen off the cliff with anybody on board --- Bose ????? (Mr. Bill included).

Rodman99999...The deal with the flat mic amp acting as a phono preamp is that for the tweeter/midrange all you need to do is roll off the boosted highs of the raw signal. Why boost the low end, only to cut it later in a crossover. Of course the woofer signal must have the regular RIAA boost, so you end up with a biamplification preamp. The whole system needs to be coordinated with the speaker design, and other sources, like Tuner, need special provisions. A can of worms, no doubt, but, for Phono, the resulting clarity of the highs is interesting.