For many, many years, I had an Hitachi SR903 integrated stereo amp. I bought it new in the late 70s. It sounded good. Class G and lots of grunt so I never really felt I wanted more. It looked the part in black and seemed to me to have a very good internal phono stage as well. However, time had caught up with it somewhat and in the late 90's, it needed a recap and health check etc. Never actually got around to that so packed it away and side tracked myself with multichannel gear for a while that never really pushed my stereo buttons. Hence in about 2006 I decided to go the pre/power route for stereo as I'd heard some good gear from a local (Melbourne) manufacturer called Aspen who made AKSA kits and some fully built Aspen items.
Ended up with a lovely sounding Aspen Soraya SS amp and a tubed Aspen GK1 pre. Very happy with this SS/tube combo as to me, it provides the perfect balance of everything I respect from both the SS and tube amplification worlds. Final nice change was when I added in an A.N.T. Kora 3T MM phono stage to replace an SS phono stage for the TT source side of things. Really sweet FET sound. For me, the real benefits of going pre/power was that I could set up a system that was synergistic and suited my taste and extra boxes were not a downside for me. So yes, I think my current amplification sounds stunning (I would wouldn't I
) but for that 20 years or so the SR903 was in the system, I was always perfectly happy and not looking to change.
