How do we remember 1970s amplifiers?

My system in 1978 was a GAS Son of Ampzilla, GAS Theadra preamp and a GAS Sleeping Beauty cartridge mounted on a JVC Direct Drive turntable. Speakers were Rectilinear 7's. Never could get the 7's to sound as good or better than the old Rectilinear 3a speakers that I traded them for. I also had a Sansui Tuner which I should have kept.

I loved my GAS electronics, quite smooth yet revealing in their day. The piece de resistance of my system was my Teac reel to reel recorder (can't remember the model).

I was working in retail at a mom & pop audio store so I changed my equipment quite frequently back then.

Sweet memories....
I owned a Phase Linear 200B (which outperformed a Quad 405 in a straight shoot-out).

Lacee, thanks for bringing up the little 20W NAD . . . this is the perfect 1980s equivalent of the Phase Linear amps. I serviced these back in the day, and even had the "Power Envelope" decendent (3225PE?) as a test-bench amplifier for several years. In contrast to the big, "all technical" 1970s aesthetic, it was small, lightweight, low-powered, and simple-looking. But like the Phase Linear, it was cheaply made and unreliable . . . and the sonic signiture was filled with exactly the opposite types of problems.

I will say that the preamp sections were pretty decent, maybe even good considering the low price . . . but the power-amp section was an absolutely atrocious piece of engineering. The key "feature" was that it didn't have emitter resistors on the output transistors, and I assume that this was an attempt to reduce notch distortion. But even if this had been a good idea (which it wasn't) . . . they then chose the absolutely cheapeast big power transistors available (2N3055/MJ2955) that have poor linearity even by 1970s standards. The result is that even with enough idle current to make it run pretty toasty, it was still really operating in underbiased Class B, and put out a whole slew of nasty harmonic and intermodulation distortion products. This may have been "redeemed" somewhat by the single-transistor input stage, which guaranteed a big helping of even-order distortion as a big sugary coating for that rancid-piece-of-meat of an output stage.

Not as good or as pleasing a sound as the tube stuff, but still better than the solid state amps I had been using in the 1970s.

This is the reason I find the new fascination for 70's solid state stuff so perplexing.
From someone who was there and listened to that stuff when it was new and all the rage, and then moving on to better things,I just can't see the interest in any of it.

Well, selective memory seems to work both ways . . . we overwhelmingly shun what was in vogue in some eras, and romanticize others. One of the reasons why I mentioned the 1970s B&O receivers was because (like the NAD amps of the 1980s) they offered a modestly-powered, domestically sensible alternative to the "high knob-per-dollar" mainstream aesthetic. They were vastly better engineered than either the Phase Linear or the NAD, but had a few quirks of their own (esp. cultural?) . . . I'm wondering whether they're remembered similarly to some of the more high-profile [sic] pieces of the decade.

The music was so much better back then that we didn't know the equipment was lousy, and a good time was had by all.

Since everything is relative, and none of us had rigs much better or much worse than the next guy; we all thought our rigs were killer at that time.

My first stereo was an Altec-Lansing 911A compact in 1972 for $419 (about $2160 in today's money). It aspired to rare heights for a compact--it incorporated a (slightly de-tuned) Altec 44 wpc receiver, Garrard SL95B (their top line consumer deck until the Zero 100), Shure M93ED, and Altec 887A speakers, an 8" 2-way sealed cab. The tuner section was excellent and the amp section wasn't too shabby either.

A couple years later I was working at a hi-fi store in SoCal where our amps were Phase Linear (we needed their 700 to power the Ohm F's), Accuphase, Marantz Pro (a good lie at the time), Crown, and a few SAE's left over.

One day We hosted a Marantz clinic where an audio engineer would measure (for free) power and distortion on any unit you could lug in. I proudly brought in my Altec 911 and was disappointed to find that its 44 wpc at mid-band dropped off to 27 wpc at 20 Hz. Turns out Altec had shrunk the power supply (compared to the receiver it was based on) to fit it in the cabinet with the turntable.

There was an orphan pair of entry-level SAE components back in the storeroom--the Mk XXX preamp and the Mk XXXIB power amp. I picked those up and started using them instead. The amp was rated at around 50 wpc but the tests at the time indicated it put out more like 70, but the cool thing is it had textbook square wave response (even better than the Crown) in the bass. You could really hear that--any speaker it powered had cleaner, tighter, more extended bass with this thing than with a receiver.

SAE was also founded by James Bongiorno who founded G.A.S. and also co-designed the Dynaco 400. As I remember it, however, the treble was a bit hot. Still, I wonder how much our perception of the separates of the time is influenced by the way we used them. We had no awareness of a "burn-in" period, let alone a warmup period for solid state. We plugged things in and immediately started evaluating them. Now I never turn my power amp off, and it was pretty edgy when I first plugged it in and turned it on.

I also had the privilege of meeting John Iverson and spending a day with him as he demonstrated his incredible A-75 class A power amp into his own speakers. Until that day I'd never known that hi-fi could do *that*!

Currently my #1 power amp is just past the '70s--the 1981 Heathkit AA-1600. I got it used for $239 and it makes my jaw drop. Just two years into the '80s, it is so far beyond the amps of the '70s. It reminds me a lot of the 1990-ish Jeff Rowland Design Group amps.