Nikko NR 519 receiver, surprised!

While doing my garage sale run last weekend I saw this Nikko NR 519 receiver for sale, not sure what obsessed me to buy it and honestly, I didn't expect much from it. Today I finally decided to hook it up to my KLH 5's and wow, no wait... WOW! This thing cranks! Very nice clean thumping bass with lots of balls, mids and highs not exaggerated. Never expected this receiver to sound this good, Im impressed.
Great receiver for low to moderate volumes, just sounds warm and sweet, it starts to lose juice when cranked very high but I guess its expected of a small-mid sized receiver.

From the little I have found on the net about this receiver, I think its a 20 watter per channel? Sounds like a 40-50 watt per channel receiver to me.

Nice find. As with all old gear, at least check the DC offset to see if it presents a danger to your speakers.
Don't get too carried away with the volume, either. If you drive it into clipping, you could hurt your speakers.

Offset checks ok. I'm mostly impressed with what 20 vintage watts can do, especially with the right speakers.

Nikko made some extremely fine sounding gear, they just were late to the party and didn't really crack the door open enough.
I was just gonna start a thread about my Nikko NR-1015, one of the very best sounding 85 wpc class receivers there were.
Currently the NR-1015 resides in the family room, driving the wunderbar Pioneer HPM-900.
Really into downsizing mode, though, took out the lil Sony ES cdplayer cause it seemed to be losing a channel. Too bad, well built piece.
Tomorrow I will be packing up books to take to the used book store. Lots of books, lots of stereo. Even thinking of taking LPs to the used record shop. And I don't need the 5 turntables anymore, just one, and that one will be the Denon DP-47f.

If Im impressed with my little 20 watter NR 519 I can imagine the 1015!
Im also trying to settle with the least as well, getting rid of the big amps soon wouldn't mind settling with just a nice receiver. It also helps to have efficient speakers that are not so power hungry when cutting back.

My first receiver was a Nikko NR 719, very similar to the 519 but a little more power. I wish I still had it, a beautiful and well-made unit. At the time, one of the selling points was that they did not over-do the feedback in order to reduce harmonic distortion, because too much feedback can raise IM distortion and make the amp slower to respond to transients. I had read in stereo magazines at the time (don't know if it's true though) that it's possible to lower THD to make the spec look good but if it's done in the wrong way it introduces worse kinds of distortion and reduces transient response, and those don't show up on spec sheets.