amplifier for large advents?

Mr_hosehead - thanks for the ideas. I had forgotten about Hafler. Those were pretty good in their day. I also forgot until you mentioned it that I have a pair of B&K mono amps in the attic. I'll try them first.

Xiekitchen - I was thinking the same thing. Have you replaced the connectors? What did you use? Does anyone do a crossover upgrade/rebuild service? Did you put the braces on the inside or outside?

The Harman Kardon receivers from the early '70s sounded great with large Advents then and still do. With dual power supplies and lots of point-to-point wiring, they have a muscular, tubey sound. A friend powers his large Advents with the H/K 430, and I use the same model with ADS L1290II in a secondary system. Only rated at 30 watts but it plays bigger, and is considered the most reliable of the x30 series at this point.

The amps one already have sitting in the attic are definitely the right ones to try! :^)

Dfwlistener: The crossbraces get glued inside. Pretty easy to do even for a klutzy non-woodworker like me. Buy some maple 1" x 1" stock at home depot.. just measure very closely and over cut not undercut until piece fits snub between front and back baffles.. glue in with wood glue..
I used somewhat inexpensive "gold plated" connectors from parts express as I did not want to spend hundreds on connectors. I used the Swedish made 12 gau wire from Madisound web site with good results (I've used this in all my speaker rebuilds.. inexpensive and sounds pretty good.) I used a couple of Kimber caps to get the right value, this improved midrange warmth and glow. There was a guy on ebay did crossover kits for these and others.. for AR speakers as well. Also he had some really good vintage looking grill cloth for AR's that I used on my advents and they look great. One thing I did was remove the inner black grill cloth to reduce the amount of fabric 'blocking' the sound. I also removed the fried egg tweeter metal grill, you have to be (obviously) very careful with this, but it opened up the tweeter dynamics a bit.

Hi Dfwlistener,I have a pair of Large Advent speakers and I drive mine with a vintage Marantz 2275 receiver and they sound wonderful together. You ought to consider this receiver , I think that you would be very surprised.
Carter