Why should I want a Sansui QS-800 4 channel amplifier?

[MrFletch]

Hi, newbie question here. In a nutshell what is an amplifier, does it do anything by itself, why would I be interested in one? After dinner and other obligations I hope to research on my own, but I'm hoping the people here have some good answers my research might not show up.

I understand hooking up a turntable, a tape deck, or a CD player to a receiver. Hey I had fun hooking up our family's system back in the day with my dad. But we weren't audiophiles and just wanted to play music and listen to the radio. As I got older my boombox handled my needs just fine so I never learned the witchcraft of separate components.

The reason I'm asking is I'm chatting with a guy selling a receiver and he asks if I'm interested in anything else he has. He knows he has a Sansui turntable of some kind and a Sansui QS-800 amplifier. The picture shows it'll power up, but that's all the info he has. He bought some stuff as a lot from either an auction or estate cell is my impression. He's willing to package other items with the receiver I'm buying from him and he seems honest about the condition of the equipment he has.

If the amp is priced right and does cool things I'm willing to get it.

Oh wait he just replied, the turntable is a FR-3060. Missing the cartridge on the end of the arm, but that can't be too hard to fix, right?

 

[Sansuiman]

The QS-800 (and less common 800A) are combination quad synth/decoder and rear channel amplifier units. These were meant to upgrade one's existing two channel receiver based system to handle 4 channel decoding And synthesizing, while adding a 2 channel power amp to drive the rear (surround) channel speakers while the existing 2 channel receiver (or amp) drive the front speakers. It also provided 4 level meters for both the front and rear channels.

The QS-800 is a well built unit, and pretty fully featured for what it does. It has a capacitor coupled output stage that will sound much like the 2000A/X, 4000 or 5000/A/X line of receivers. The quad decoding and synth on the original 800 are a bit less impressive, as they predate the "Vario-matrix" QS decoder that was featured in the QRX 6001-9001 receivers and QSD-1,2 and 1000 standalone decoders. It's quad performance is probably more akin to that if the earlier QR line of receivers, or maybe the QRX-5500/7500 depending on where it fell in the development cycle.

The QS-800A had an early iteration of vario-matrix, and is arguably better in both channel separation, and it's synthesized quad effects. It will still fall a bit short of the final vario-matrix featured in the QRX-6001-9001 and QS-D decoders.

Conceivably you could use tbe QS-800 as a standalone 2 channel amplifier, by simply hooking 2 channel sources to the rear channel inputs, and speakers to the rear channel outputs. However, that would be an odd implementation, and not really it's intended purpose.