I am with you on the glory of Sansui 70s gear. Just want to point out that I've finally dipped my toes into some of the better 90s Sansui gear and IMO they got back to the 70s sound at the end. In fact at comparable power levels the new stuff is almost indistinguishable from my AU-777A in double blind.
Of course the big Krells will drive almost anything which can't be said of the Sansui units. With more regular loads I think many will be surprised with how similar well designed (and sorry, but that does include many Sansui) amps sound in double blind. Even with an amp selector box instantly switching between the amp you will find it hard in many cases.
The Sansui circuit designs were certainly within economic limitations which limits performance in extreme, but were not limited in design quality.
Actually Sansui was probably a leader in circuit design. Even to this day their ideas are getting reused and reinvented from diamond diff to super-feedforward (even saw the later used in an NSOM (near-field scanning optical microscope) research paper recently). Outside of extreme power/speaker demand situations the differences are not as big as many think. Double-blind tests on my end have 'been there and done that'. I've compared the Sansui gear to various big amps including Krell, ME (defunct Australian brand), ML, McIntosh, etc. And I measure on the bench too... once you get past the era of strong voicing of amps (which seems to last up to some point in early 80s), there isn't much difference between well designed amps, under usual operation. As Nelson Pass says, good amps mostly behave the same under normal conditions; it's how they misbehave that is where the differences are.
I don't post too much about all of that (Sansui vs the big boys) because I think one has to really experience it to believe it. Without that experience, you are unlikely to convince either party. But I do talk a lot about Sansui vs Sansui, because that's what people are here in this forum for
.
While Botrytis and I have some different points of view I like to think we could debate this all over a cold beer and have a nice chat. One thing Botrytis is right about IMO is the need for double bind testing. I basically don't listen to anything on this forum anymore about amp flavour and comparisons unless the poster mentions double blind AND amp selector box. All of my amp comparison tests are done blind and with amp selector box. Without double blind I sometimes get it right, if I'm using the amp selector box going between the amp instantly, but without the selector and double blind I often get it wildly wrong. E.g. Recently I swore my newly acquired alpha-907limited was bright and lacking bass in comparison to a smaller underdog. I thought that for a week until I inserted double-blind and amp box, and there was not much in it at all. I was surprised myself when I realized how much I let my underdog champion mentality get in the way. I've been doing amp comparisons since the early 90s and I thought I could let my experience bypass the need for the proper amp comparison procedure for a week as I moved my setup around. I was wrong.
As I wrote in an earlier post, I have had various big amps and have come full circle back to smaller vintage stuff. Each to their own (depending on your speaker load and volume requirements
).