Best Amp for $300 to Power Paradigm Monitor 9s

They use those Crowns for exercise classes at my Gym along with four high corner mounted high efficiency pro horn loaded speakers (forget the make) at my gym. I hear them for a hour or so almost everyday. Acoustics in those rooms are the pits though, and I doubt those HE horns are a great match, so hard for me to assess apples/apples for home use. COuld be a great bargain with the right speakers at home perhaps. I smaller somewhat high efficiency speakers at home I use with my Class D amps. Not bad, but tube amplification does seem to go a long ways with higher efficiency speakers in particular.

Wolf_garcia is right about the fan. You can hear it, but I don't think its too noisy. One thing worth mentioning about me is that I can't listen to music in a room that is dead silent. I find that its just not natural. I know that most audiophiles prefer a dead silent room.

Another thing I should mention since someone brought up the Crown, is that the QSC is a traditional design, where the Crown is class d. I bought the QSC just to experiment with. I've never heard a class d amp that I liked, so I thought getting the QSC would make for a better comparison.

The amp does have limitations, but its a $300 amp and that's what the OP was asking for. I think the QSC is definitely worth the money. It has tons of power and appears to be built like a tank. It sounds fairly neutral but the imaging isn't all that great. I got mine from Guitar Center. They have a very good return policy so you are not stuck with it if you don't like it.

My budget is about 300 dollars, and I'd like something in the 100 WPC range, so I will likely buy second hand vintage.

Another possibility to consider, should one appear for sale, would be a Carver M400t "cube amp," which is rated at 200 watts/channel and I believe typically sells for slightly less than your budget.

That was a 1980's amp whose "transfer function" (the relation between its output and its input) was intended to emulate that of the highly regarded and very expensive pure class A Mark Levinson ML-2. It didn't quite succeed in that regard, as might be expected, but I owned one for a number of years and its sonics were very respectable for its price class (and higher), at least when used in conjunction with easy to drive speakers. (I couldn't find an impedance curve for your particular speakers, but they are rated as "8 ohm compatible," and I found additional reasons to suspect they are not difficult loads). And it sounded fully as powerful and dynamic as its 200W rating would suggest.

DO NOT, however, buy any of the earlier "non-t" versions of the M400, which were quite poor sonically IMO. And I have no experience with "t" versions of other Carver models of that era which were designed to emulate the transfer function of a Conrad Johnson tube amp (which I suspect would not be a good match for your speakers even if the emulation were perfect), rather than the transfer function of the solid state ML-2.

The M400t, btw, did not use electrolytic capacitors for energy storage (using the magnetic field of an inductor instead), which eliminates a significant concern about condition that would apply to most other amps which are that old. The amp I owned, btw, is still going strong after 30+ years, in the home of a relative.

Regards,
-- Al

Ok, this is the very best amp for $300-$400. Very good sounding amp for sure. Muse model 100 just showed up!

http://app.audiogon.com/listings/solid-state-muse-model-100-stereo-power-amp-silver-2014-09-19-amplifiers-95831-sacramento-ca

I had a Carver m4.0t 360w/ch into 8ohm for many years. Sold it used for just over $300. Very nice amp with tube amp like transfer function. I think this was the CJ emulator model, don't recall exactly. WOrked quite well with Magnepans I used with it and most easier load speakers that a tube amp would do well with.

The Maggies were quite inefficient though and benefited from all 360 watts.