Poor recordings that are now great.

"Your final conclusion of using good, bad and middle of the road recordings to evaluate gear lends credence to my initial assertion, does it not? In any case, top notch gear has not had much of an influence in moving past that 'barrier' until now".

Well, let me put it this way: some gear designs have traditionally concentrated mainly on making good or excellent recordings sound sensationally good - even if at the expense of rendering less-than-stellar recordings to sounding like crap. And likewise, some gear seems as if it were designed in the opposite way and they do relatively well with good and almost-good recordings, but at the expense of not distinguishing so well the differences between good recordings and great ones. This is really the old "ruthlessly revealing" vs "forgiving" nature thing. My assumption is that there can be such a thing as gear that can accomplish both goals, but that technically this is evidently rather difficult to pull off in the real world (or at least rather expensive). Having your gear modified in the way it was may have done something toward straddling the best of both worlds - taking your 'revealing' TNT200's and, while keeping their revealingness intact, also extended their performance to include being able to better handle the 'less-than-excellent' recordings as well, i.e., adding more forgivingness. I sometimes think designers tend to focus on one end or the other of the 'revealingness/forgiveness' spectrum, apart from cost and technical reasons, simply because they feel that's what their customers expect from them - and that, with revealingness in particular, many makers may perceive buyers as being obsessed with the 'absolute best' in everything. The 'absolute best' sounding gear for the money and the 'absolute best' sounding recordings to play on them and that most of those buyers will, when confronted with the bulk of the recordings that don't seem to measure up on their high-end systems, will not attribute the fault to their gear (which I think it may sometimes be...even expensive gear), but mistakenly blame instead the recording as being substandard. At least that's my take on it.

That could very well be. But I'm comparing my experience to the past 30+ years with various gear. I suppose you're right and I've finally come across an amp to successfully challenge those recordings. I guess a better question might have been to ask what your opinions are on the quality of those on my list. However, my intent is to identify the gear. In this case, the TNT200 FWIW. I've used plenty of recognizably great amps but they've always seemed to be challenged by those early recordings in the same way.

I see. IME amps have always been the trickiest to get right in a system. Maybe that's made worse by that fact that there seems to be such slim pickings for them these days. It seems easier by far to get revved up about some really good preamp candidates...or DACs, TTs or speakers...but, somehow, not amps. At least for anything I've seen under $5k. Ask different people about amps and you get a different answer from every person. Not too long ago, I asked Ric Schultz of EVS as to what in the heck I could possibly get from him as a recommendation for an amp under $3k and he just couldn't come up with an answer at the time...and he got his start modifying amps. All my possible suspects that I posed to him he wound up shooting down. Others whose opinion I trust have had the same sort of problem making an amp recommendation to me. My current amps are Monarchy SM-70 Pro's (balanced mono's). They are a probably a bit too much on the forgiving side of things for me to outright recommend them to most people, but, for lack of anything on the horizon to replace them with, I'm actually doing quite well with that limitation...plus they happened to be spectacularly cheap at only $588 each. But, by far my best solution to this issue (and many others) was to have heavily invested into electronic noise reduction ala Alan Maher Designs. This has been crazy good for the performance of my system...but I had to drop a pretty penny for it all...about $9k. It did help these amps do much better with excellent recordings, but all that may really be a whole nother kettle of fish, really. I haven't heard the TNT200's, but it is good to know about them in this light. I wish I could be of more help than that. I've only hear the Oppo on your list and believe it to be good, but I'm not familiar with Meridian pre's. I do agree with you that speakers in this case don't seem to be as big an issue.

My last response was to Zd542. John, I have to disagree on your rational. I have not experienced the polar sonic differences you ascribe to specific amp designs. A better(imo)amp has always performed significantly better sonically in every way. There's always been a smaller, albeit significant improvement with the best recordings. Hence the logic in using the poor ones to measure sonic performance. Almarg has a very good and valid position in shooting this methodology down, but I have gotten used to knowing just what to listen for over the years. I suppose I could just as easily use his logic. However,'the better the poor ones sound, the better the overall performance will be', has rung true. The TNT200's have done just that. They ring like a bell. These are vintage IC-less amps. Cost for each including the work done is about $1,400.00. I have three with fully balanced and mono capability, and one TNT120 with only stereo/balanced operation. I'm in the process of building a fully active altered JBL 4345 system. It took a while to acquire them as they are relatively rare in the used market.

I recognize a lot of those and no doubt many are CD recordings (some remastered and released on CD within the last 20 years or so perhaps?) that can sound fantastic when things are going right, and not so interesting otherwise. The devil is all in the details. Lots of older and newer versions/releases/re-masterings of most of these over the years, some quite good, some not so much. It all depends on which version/release specifically and how well things are going on the playback end. Newer versions of most of these on CD I have heard have a lot of good things going on. They are not perfect recordings nor bad ones, somewhere more in the middle, which works usually for me.