Adcoms sound sweet!

This sounds pretty sweet and there were a bunch of them on Ebay. Class A/B for class D price. Good condition. Sounds sweet. Might make a good budget amp for somebody.


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Nice layout dig the transformer and the quad caps. Looks like it can handle torque !

Stuff like the gfa 555 ii and 5500 have always been great values on the used market, imo sweet amps for the money

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Yeah bass is no problem. The treble is a little relaxed though. I’ve only just gotten it and I hooked it up to some cheap speakers in my garage but so far this is a good buy. The cheapest class A/B I’ve found is the Emotiva Basx and I haven’t heard that for comparison, but this was half the price.

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I got to look into these.:thinking:

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The gfa 535, 545, and 555 are nelson pass designs, being able to get them as cheap as they are used is really nice. The mk ii models of the above are the pass designs with some tweaks, and things like the 5500, 5400, and 5300 are also a pass design with a bit different capabilities and signature but also still great

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I would love to own one of those Pass designs. I would love to own any Pass Labs or First Watt amp too.

Corrected myself above, seems like the 5xxx series are also pass designs too, so I guess you already have one of those lol (I thought they were only semi pass designed but I guess they are just straight up pass designs). But yes the pass labs gear is excellent and I adore the sound of some of the first watt amps. The cheapest way to get a first watt type of sound might be something like amp camp amps but that’s pretty different from the adcoms or pass labs stuff for example (and you have to build it yourself)

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I’ve heard of the amp camp amps, and considered buying one, but 8W per channel seems like it would be very limiting.

I would go all class A and tubes if I could.

Depends on the speaker, but yes it really is picky for what speakers work well with it (but so are first watt amps as well, they are somewhat picky with what they sound good with). You could buy two and get 15 wpc which is more reasonable (and you get a nice sonic improvement as well along with the power) but that’s more money and more work assembling them lol. At that point you could try and scour the used market for first watt clones/diy under 1k and see what you can find

Yeah there’s not a lot of cheap but also good class a tube speaker amps from my experience (most likely because tube amps are really dependent on the quality of parts used which it’s hard to get higher quality components at a low price level)

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I’m pretty satisfied with my 545ii. With both elac uni and ls50 :+1::+1: was like $250 on ebay

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