B&K vs Adcom – opinions please

I too have owned the ST140 as well as the Adcom 535, 545 and 555. Believe it or not, the Adcom GFA-535 is, by a good margin, the best of the lot and puts out quite a bit more power than the rating would suggest. Perhaps it is due to it having seperate frame transformers for each channel as opposed to the single toroidial in the other amps. The B&K and bigger Adcoms just sound glazed and sluggish compared to it.

Funny thing about opinions, everybody has one. I too have owned all the above amps and completely disagree with the previous posts. The adcoms are all highly mediocre sounding amps with flat 2 dimensional presentations and somewhat dry and brittle high ends. They have very good to excellent low end control and power but can sound overdamped on speakers that already have tight bass. The B&K's have a much warmer and full bodied sound with a lot of the palpable presence one gets with tube amps. They may be slightly less detailed than the Adcoms but present a much more musical overall picture. The bottom end on the B&K's is not as tight as the Adcoms and will sound a little plump on some speakers. The bottom line is I still own and enjoy the B&K's and the Adcom's are long gone and not missed even a little.

I have to agree with Infinitebaffle, I still have B&K M-200's with Cardas output posts and Cardas cables, Shunyata P/C's, and they sound fantastic, just my 2 cents.

Infinite brings up a great point. So much of this stuff is system dependent and listener dependent that recommendations must be taken with a grain of salt. My fast and direct is his brittle and two dimensional, his musical and warm is my sluggish and glazed. One experience that I found with all of the inexpensive amps was that a tube preamp could really minimize some of the shortcomings of these budget perfomers.

What is your price range? There are better amps for sale here on Agon. For example, look at the Kinergetics KBA-75 amps for sale. I am also going to sell mine if interested. You can get two of these class A amps for $1200 or one for $600 from Katli Audio. I own the amp and it was equal to the Rowland M-112 and gave up nothing to the Specton Musician II amp. The amp was rated B by Stereophile but adding a better power cord really made the amp sing. It is much more musical and dynamic than the two amps you are considering and can drive anything.