Well my fellow Head-fiers I need your advice, if you don't mind. I can buy a Kenwood KA-907, in good working condition, for $750.00 CDN. I will offer $700.00 & see but I digress.
I've read a couple of recent posts about this amp on this thread, saying that it's an extremely difficult amp to service. On the other hand I also read that it's so neutral that it's the closest amp to the 500C sound wise. So, what to do ? Is the price reasonable ? Since it is a vintage amp it could require servicing in the near future & if it's difficult to service .... There's no perfect answer, I realize that but I'd still like to know what some of you think.
Thank you.
Well, I'm not familiar with that model, but here are the considerations I would think about:
If it's original/unrestored, it will require servicing at some point since the caps are >35yrs old. If you can do the work yourself and it's a reasonably easy unit to access boards to do the work, that's not a big deal. But if you say it's an extremely difficult to service, you either better be good/experienced to undertake the servicing, or willing to pay a fair amount of dough to get it serviced. If you're not going to service it yourself, be prepared to add another $300-400 to your purchase price. Then the question becomes: is the unit worth $1000-1100 to you?
Now, you can use it as is until something actually does go wrong, but you just have to hope that when something does go wrong, it doesn't take expensive headphones or speakers with it. And then you'll have to make that decision then whether to invest $ to fix it or sell it for parts/repair. Likely, if you want to fix it, you'll have to invest more than the $300-400 you would have had to spend to restore it while it work working. Because once something goes wrong, you have to find out what went wrong, fix the root cause and all other components that might have been taken out by the component that failed (such as output transistors or other transistors that wouldn't normally fail on their own), and then maybe recap the rest to avoid it all happening again. If you're paying someone to do that, you'll be paying for the troubleshooting time as well.
This model appears to be a monster integrated with 150W. Are you planning on running it with lower efficiency speakers or wanting to get to extremely high volumes? If so, then maybe you need that power. But if you're just planning on running it with headphones, it's pretty safe to say you don't need that kind of power and you can get by with a lower model and lower price.
Also, once you're getting into that kind of money ($700 untouched, or $1000-1100 restored), you're in the territory where you can actually get a 500C if that's what you're really looking for. Tube units like the 500C ARE generally easier to service yourself. because it's point to point assembled and you can trace the connections visually (vs buried traces in PCBs that become harder to digest). And on the tube units, there are fewer things to actually have to replace (some can caps, some coupling caps, maybe a selenium rectifier).
Plus, a 500C or similar would likely be easier to sell if you wanted to move on to another piece later.
So if it were me, I'd only consider it if I really needed the power, were capable of restoring the unit myself, and liked the sound of this particular model. I've never spent more than about $250 for a solid state receiver for the above reasons, but have spent $300-400 on tube units because I have confidence I can get them where they need to be reliable and resell them relatively easily.
Just food for thought. Good luck in your decision.
This will bring this Luxman to a new different level
just dont go that road.
taking it over to peoples houses and loved to see the reaction on peoples faces when they hooked it up and it trounced their receivers sonically making a lot if not most of them sound like
