Experience with Proton Amps/Receivers?

[zaskarx]

I recently picked up a Proton 930 receiver at the thrift store with the intention of using it in my workshop. In disassembling it for cleaning, I was surprised at just how well designed this thing is.

In addition to a serious tuner it has a very nice, fully discrete phono preamp that takes up half of the main circuit board. I've never seen a 30 watt per channel budget receiver with a MC head amp, pretty neat!

Info on Proton gear is relatively sparse, the main thing I've found is that these were built by the same company that manufactured gear for NAD back in the early 80's.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experience with Proton gear, the 930 seems like a sleeper.

 

[ivandezande]

Not that rare. I think there's a few threads like this one.

It's much like NAD. Cheap, cost cutting designs on the ragged edge that sound pretty dang good.
Those purple Matsushita leak really bad, I've seen pads rot away, and there's giant pools of corrosive glue on the 2200uF caps in your picture. I would get that taken care of.

 

[jheu02]

I've enjoyed a D940 since around '88-'89. Still waiting to get a D1200.

 

[hornbostel]

I run a D940 receiver in my work office driving a pair of Smaller Advents. The Proton is a beast The D940 is 40w 8 ohm but with 6dB of headroom, so it’ll put out 160w short term. About double this into my 4 ohm Advents!