Crown amps

12-12-06: Whoaru99, & Tony3d..
#1 The K2 is a world of a different amp, and it is AWESOME, due to no FAN, Big Power, Very little power draw, ZERO heat, and it is very liquid smooth and compact... This is nothing Like the Other Crown we are talking about which if you note above the K series was mentioned by me as being a better choice, however the Carver z series is very similar I believe but still has a Fan..

I have never used a Crown pro amp, but have a power line 3 which was in there last home system line of equipment.
It is called multimode which switches from class A to class B and to Class AB. I have been happy with the sound of the amp and compared to former amps of this era I would rate it high.

I heard a Crown Macro Reference (as I vaguely recall) at an air show: the sound was incredibly loud out on the airfield, and standing about 100 yards away from the speakers; but if you're looking for detail, precision, and accuracy, you might consider alternatives to pro. audio. Not sure what speaker load you're driving, but I read a review that the Crown Macro Reference -- "which should have been able to drive just about anything in the universe" -- choked at the load that Sound Lab A-1's presented; yet, a pair of 225 watt monoblocks did an impeccable job comparatively.

The Crown XTI 2000 puts out an amazing 2000 watts @ 2 ohms, but then again can it and will it in fact drive the suffocating loads of an electrostat setup -- if this is what you have -- or will the overload lights go bonkers as apparently occurred with the Macro Reference's attempt at driving the A-1's. Although Crown is a world-reknown Company with a dominant presence in arena type settings, it would be interesting to see and feel a crowd's reaction to relatively more precise amplification by Threshold, Krell, Levinson, VTL, Classe, MBL, etc. If these manufacturers can build machines that drive two ohms or less, I wonder how these machines would fare driving much less exhausting eight ohm pro speakers. I'm a relative novice at this stuff, hence the many wonders.

I had a Crown K-2 myself. Like everything else mentioned in this thread it exceeds the sound of a Crown IC-150 by a large measure. Back in the mid seventies I worked in a place that sold Crown and SAE. Crown held on to second place pretty well until we picked up Yamaha and Pioneer came out with the Spec 2 and then Denon arrived. Crown kept falling further back until we finally dropped them.
The Crown K-2, however, would have held its own easily among that group.
Another thing to consider actually would be a Plinius integrated. You can get pretty big power and far better sound than ANY AMP could provide fed by the IC-150.

If you stick with vintage solid state, there are some good-sounding amps and preamps from the '80s, such as VSP Labs, Amber, Threshold, Electron Kinetics (the Eagle line), Bryston, and others. Even the "budget" components were pretty good, such as Adcom and Parasound, though Adcom got a LOT better in the next 20 years after the GFA-555.

Not so much so with the SS stuff from the '70s. By today's standards most would be considered edgy, etched, and lacking microdynamic refinement. The Marantz Pro and McIntosh stuff was pretty smooth, though.

OTOH, in the late '90s the Crown Macro Reference was a Stereophile Class B recommended component.