What got me interested in many of the amps mentioned above, was GAS (Great American Sound) of the mid to late seventies. It was their Ampzilla that moved me from Sansui over to the higher end, where I would later discover Threshold and Mark Levinson. I could not afford either of these brands and wound up with that Carver cube. I paired that with a Counterpoint preamp (SA-?) and SOTA distributed Audioplan Kontrapunkt mini monitors. That really put me on the merry-go-round.
Kenny
Kenny