Kane Change must be a rookie claiming to be an audiophile! No one with any knowledge of audio equipment would have auditioned a system set-up with the source selected - no wonder his crappy receiver still sounded good for the money! Shame on you!
Having heard the Acurus with decent ancilliaries (Acurus ACD11 and Marantz CD17 with the Acurus L1 preamp and just about any speaker within its load tolerance), a four star is more justified!

Well I read all the reviews here and found them most interesting and correctwell except for Kane's review. I bought a A250 to replace my first Amp I
bought the Adcom 555mkII. To sum it up the A250 is in a different class then
the Adcom and I'm including the GFA5500 & 5800 which I tried first before the
A250 and for the price 675.00 (DEMO) it was unbeatable at the time. I do
agree with some of the other reviewer's that this Amp will do wonders with
the right componts around it and it's also a very touchy Amp if using the
wrong one's like the sony portable. The bass was tight and was alittle more
dark or maybe laid back I should say the the Adcom's. The highs seemed to
mostly depend on which speakers I used with it. So I do recommend trying to
match this Amp pretty close otherwise it maybe not what your looking for.
But the Quality was outstanding and for the Money? very hard to beat.

But I have to disagree with Scott as far as the A250 and spending the extra
grand for an Aragon 8008. If I still had my A250 I would give it away plus
a grand for the 8008.

A powerful amplifier, with relatively good musicality, the Acurus A250 sounded a bit more veiled than the Parasound with which I replaced it.

Bass control is not as tight compared with the Parasound, and voices do not sound as natural to me, but it was a great step up from the Arcam integrated 60 I was using previously.

It's hard for me to justify the value of the Acurus relative to the Parasound, so I give it only 3 stars in value. However, build quality is excellent. This amp has so much reserve capacitance that it plays on for almost a minute after I've turned it off!

Be aware though, that the circuit topology is not DC coupled - there are 2 _electrolytic_ capacitors in the signal path!!!

Similar Products Used:

Parasound HCA-1000A