Ok, guys here got me going last week and now I've just bought a C-504 to go with my (yet-to-be-delivered) MC2100.

Paid $535 for the 2100, $304 for the preamp.

How am I doing so far?

And still haven't fixed the problem y'all helped me uncover -- gonna get to fixiing those Advents as soon as the stuff for re-foaming gets here.

Hmm. $839, plus a total of $105 for shipping. . . . $944 -- how will it stack up against, say, $2000 of brand new equipment?

Ok, guys here got me going last week and now I've just bought a C-504 to go with my (yet-to-be-delivered) MC2100.

Paid $535 for the 2100, $304 for the preamp.

How am I doing so far?

And still haven't fixed the problem y'all helped me uncover -- gonna get to fixiing those Advents as soon as the stuff for re-foaming gets here.

Hmm. $839, plus a total of $105 for shipping. . . . $944 -- how will it stack up against, say, $2000 of brand new equipment?

It's a matter of opinion. I'm really not too keen on old-school amplifiers with output transformers - to be quite honest, as far as I can tell, it was only in the late 70's that amplifiers started to dip below the 0.1% THD+N. Others, however, find the sound produced far more pleasant than that of more modern, OPT-less designs.

These items fall into the category of "you like 'em or you don't" - to those who prefer them, McIntosh amplifiers are better than anything else on earth, regardless of price.

I, on the other hand, belong to the crowd of those who are into high-tech stuff - for example, some boffin in China came up with a class-D amplifier design based off of Phillips' UCD line that has a PWM rate of 1.2mhz! (Class D amplifiers distort increasingly as you get closer to the rate of sampling, but we can't hear anywhere near 40khz anyway.)

That said, I like "old-school" equipment because it's often much like a used car: Not quite as nice as the newer model, but much, much cheaper. However, older (pre-1983) equipment is often far more reliable than more modern equipment (it's worked this long!), and is often a terrific value - while I doubt that the Sansui AU series can compete with most of today's top-end stuff, it can be had for the same price as the junk you'll find at RadioShack and BestBuy - $80 instead of $800 (And that's if you don't restore it yourself!)

In my opinion, for $500...there's better out there. I would reccomend a used Nelson Pass class-A design; while they're not so powerful, the distortion specs are second to none, and you can get one of the older models for $400 or less on eBay. I've also seen a homemade Aleph-X sell for under $300 on eBay, aand one can be built for roughly the same amount. Say what you will, the class-A designs of nelson pass are very, very hard to improve upon by anyone. (They also make impressive space heaters.)

(Nelson Pass is the designer of the "Threshold" series of pre-amplifiers that were so popular in the 80's).

Alternately, if you want lots of power with super-low (if not "tube-like") distortion, the Hypex UCD line is hard to beat. The UCD180 will give 180 watts per channel, and a frugal individual can assemble a complete amplifier for under $300.

Finally, I've heard nothing but glowing reviews of the Sansui AU-7900 and several other high-power AU-series recievers. The tuners in these are supposed to be second to none; while I'm really more of a FLAC fan, I can't deny that pulling in far stations is a hoot.