The reason you feel that way is because the A07 at the time used the wrong volume pot. Volume pots normally used in audio equipment use a logarithmic taper A characteristic, but the A07 used the incorrect linear taper B characteristic, which resulted in the volume being close to maximum at the ten o'clock position. This means that even a small turn of the knob changes the volume significantly, making the amp feel very powerful. Recent models from various companies have changed this and now use the original taper A characteristic.
Are you sure? That's not what I measured on my A07s.
Having read something similar about the A07, I took one of mine apart. I couldn't see any identifying markings on the gain (volume) pot so that I couldn't tell what manufacturer and/or part number it was. Without that, I couldn't hunt down a data sheet that would specify exactly how the potentiometer would perform.
To satisfy my curiosity, I provided the A07 with a 1 kHz signal at 0.775 VRMS amplitude (the input sensitivity of the A07) and measured the output into three different dummy loads. (My system is tri-amped and one A07 drives 4 ohm woofers, another drives 16 ohm midrange drivers, and the third drives 8 ohm tweeters).
Since the A07 gain knob is sparsely marked, I marked mine as shown in this image:
I then measured the output voltage at each position on the gain dial. I repeated that exercise 3 times, one for each load. I averaged the two channels per amp to produce this graph:
Here is the same data, but with the output presented in watts.
And here is that same data, but using a logarithmic scale for power. I omitted the data from the first two dial positions (A and B) because the output voltages were 0.
While the plots on the log graph aren't perfectly straight lines, they're pretty close.
I did find that the input sensitivity of the A07 was misstated because the waveform would clip before the input amplitude reached 0.775VRMS.
