I had one years ago but they were rare birds over here. All I remember was that it was very handsome and worked well with the equipment I had at the time.

Designed at an early stage of power transistor technology the P series were so easily blown up while the ingenious feedback volume control was subject to noise and channel imbalances, but it was good sounding for the time and always looked fantastic. I owned a couple of the later iterations and still have one somewhere?


Martin Colloms

Martin, I just bought a refurbished P110 to use in a second, vintage, system but it sounded so good that it went into the main one!

It excels in detail, ambience, soundstage, musical and deep bass, good dynamics, transient attack and pace/timing. If there is any fault in the sound it is that it is very revealing of any hardness in the rest of the chain.

All modern amps seem to lack that incisive transient response and dynamics that makes a rimshot so lifelike that it can make one jump with surprise (this actually happened a couple of nights ago!).

Is there an amp today that will give me such a listenable experience at reasonable cost?

bencat: funny you should say that.

My son was here last night in part to listen to the P110. He's also a bit of a nut for good sound though uses a surround system based on a cheap-ish Onkyo receiver however, before listening, he said he's going to build a dedicated 2 channel system for music. BTW, his description of the sound was remarkable: he;s not a hi-fi nut of the old school but a 25 year old yet his comments on the sound were exactly what you'd hear from the likes of us - very astute! He was also amazed by the detail, bass that wasn't in your face but could be listened to & felt, the detail etc. so last night I emailed him details of a couple of 2 channel amps to consider: first was the Pioneer ( afriend bought one years ago on my recommendation) and the Rotel RA-1062 (ditto last comment, though it didn't quite sound as good as our old Lentek).

For the price, an A400 is definitely worth a look and might just give him (us!) some low cost fun!

Any other ideas?

I'd also been thinking of a secondhand Krell X400i and a new Primare for our main system but both seem to have their problems.

Edited by user 28 January 2012 02:33:06(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Richard

Despite the strong negative I still think the Pineer is a very good amp of its kind . I could not live with one but I do recognise its strenghts which I thought matched the Cambridge P50 descriptions given. So for me at least I still think it is worthy of consideration given the price you can pay for a very good example.

Other considerations are a little more difficult and depend on your budget. If you are considering the Krell route then my own recomendation would be an original KSA 50 or 100 which can be had with patience for around £800 in full working order and in many cases pretty good cosmetic condition as well. These are the original real Class A units and I use a KSA 50 myself . If you can stretch to a pre amp as well then a Croft or Audio Note valve pre are worth consdiering as the combination of transistor power and Valve pre is very seductive. Think both of those could be had for same price as the Krell intergrated. If funds ar tight the Krell will work perfectly well with a good passive either make one yourself using the stepped attenuators that are available on e-bay or look through the pre amps and a number of options often come up including the Moth one which is good and looks fine.

An original Sugden / Richard Allen 21A intergrated would also work wonders and sound very good being an all class A design but it might struggle with driving your speakers to higher levels again depends on what level you like to listen at.

Final recommendation would be like the Cambridge hard to find but worth the effort Meridian 105 Mono Blocks (do not partner this with the original pre which was not really anything like good enough) A Michell Argo , DPA 50s or similar would work as the pre but there are so many out there would leave it to you to match up at the time.

Nothing like an exhaustive list I know but would certianly stand by all of the above as being good quality . In some cases (Meridians , Krell) with reall care in set up and some remidial work (replacement Mains caps , Kimber By pass , Schotky Diodes) they can be made to sing to a very high level. Let us all know how you get on as often you will see something not mentioned here ( I have always wanted to try one of those Lyngdorf digital amps) and that takes you in a whole other direction which is often half the fun.

Old references can be surpassed !

so don't neglect the powerful convenient and thoroughly musical Naim SuperNait

near zero running costs , great value S/H and with as/h hi-cap for later upgrade

not neglecting the almost as satisfying and better value Nait XS also very upgradeable

Martin C

Friend has a current Nait, very impressive, "balanced" sound for want of a better term, I think extremely different from the old Naim sound. Very heavy duty tweaking of everything around the amp, and the Naim has kept up with the pace of the improvements. The only thing so far was when getting under the hood, found that the main fuse wasn't a tight fit.

Frank

Edited by user 29 January 2012 02:28:21(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Difficult to find, but a very "musical" integrated: Sonneteer Campion or Alabaster....

In its final itteration, which I suspect you have, the P110 sounded very very good. I'd discovered that components made a difference by that stage so the specs of some of the transistors and capacitors changed. Cambridge Audio always bought small signal transistors under its own part numbers (it bought a mountain of devices) so we could respec them as needed. At that stage the transistors came from HK & Japan and faster devices in the power amplifiers made a big difference. The phono stage needed to be improved particularly in terms of residual noise although the active volume control hid the defects effectively giving a high dynamic range. However for the P60/P80 I changed the phono stage to a different design which was quieter.

Martin is right in saying that later products will sound better but that isn't because of circuit design limitations. I actually re-hashed some of my Cambridge circuits on another model a decade or so ago and it was very well received. Building a P110 or P60 with modern components, particularly volume controls (!!!) and a bit of intelligence and the results are excellent.

I have to admit that last year I bought two examples of the P60 on Ebay for peanuts with the intention of rebuilding them when I get a few quiet moments. That may be some years away

Stan

I served something of an apprenticeship at Audio T Dryden Chambers rented rooms Oxford Street testing P50 and P110 for customer's individual lab reports ...

Several desired perfectly matched teak end plates!

We certainly rated them well at that time though a 110 driven hard into IMFs would get too hot to touch and then trip out

I bought a P50 recently out of nostalgia , crackly volume too! the styling is still spot on........

Martin Colloms

Edited by user 07 March 2012 18:47:58(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified