Agoners: Need Advice! Have 3K to spend on an Amp, what do I do with no way to audition?

I used to sell B&W 802's and they tend to be a bit power/current hungry (4ohms?) so it is possible that the midrange harsh qualities are a bit of artifacts from your other gear...  or your room acoustics... or aging drivers... I had found them to be a fairly "polite" sounding speaker during that era of audio...

I loved the Mark Levinson gear driving those speakers and sold a lot of systems matched that way... hard beat ML build quality... The camac connecters were a little off beat but ultra high quality... Just not compatible with everything else which was mostly RCA inputs and duel banana outputs... not so the ML gear that I remember...  The ML3 as mentioned above was a big serious amp of that era yet, to my ears the 23.5's would be better and there is the problem... "to my ears" it's your ears that count and those ML amps do weigh a lot to ship..  

I love ARC amps too, listening to an old SS ARC 100.2 now and they are proud to offer excellent service on their products... Many to choose from but you will probably find you need an amp with high current capabilities and even used ARC amps can be pricey... do consider them though...   BTW.. It's even possible to talk to a human when you call them...

last but certainly not least...

A big YES to the Brystons for your speakers... I used to sell those too... Not all clients had the $$$$ for the ML gear so Bryston was often my go gear for those B&W 802's
I have an old Bryston 3B that still sounds amazing and had to be serviced a few years back for a wimpy channel... it was past the 20 year warranty and yet I think they charged me for the shipping,  a new box, and not the repairs... A truly reputable company... for those 802's I feel you would be best off with the 200wpc version, the 4B, to get that solid bottom end happening... Brystons are a high current, high damping factor, fast rise time amp always producing much more than their rated power on the test bench... The newer models are of course sweeter sounding so look into those for sure... You can find a used Bryston 4B SST2 with single ended and balanced inputs in your price range and probably still under warranty to boot.  Then I suggest you audition some various cables in your system to see if any remaining midrange hash you hear is caused by cable artifacts... it can be a bit neurotic but also gratifying. 

Have you heard of the Sanders Magtech, its as good if not better than most of the amps mentioned here AND you can demo one in your house for free, call up Roger at Sanders Sound and try one for 30 days then send it back, if  you like how it sounds look for a used one on Audiogon which go for around 3k.  

How about buying new...the Emotiva XPA Gen3 2 channel to start you can add more channels later.....2 channel is $2000