Maybe it was the high distortion and asymmetrical waveforms everyone liked about the B&K on a 4 ohm speaker like the Maggies.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/bk-st-140-power-amplifier-1989-measurements
I suspect that might be closer to the truth than just power/current capabilities.
There was definitely a preference I think for “warmer sounding” amps with the Maggies.
From a technical perspective, I do think that Maggies don’t do as well at the higher end of the spectrum in quality of sound (especially the earlier ones) and so the “bright” amps (or even perfectly linear ones) don’t sound as good or sound too bright or induce fatigue.
Sort of like room eq target curves that slope down at higher end being preferred by listeners than a flat line.
I have experimented with Audyssey, ARC and REW for my Maggies. The worst was the Audyssey and REW trying to keep the line flatter. When I did the auto-correction with ARC, I was surprised to see the resulting target aggressively sloped down but the sound was amazing. I then tried to mimic that ARC correction with REW using Equalizer APO on a PC and was able to get similar good results. Hence, my suspicions about what the amps that sounded good with Maggies may have been doing in their FR.
There could be some interplay with the type of harmonics present in those amps as well.
None of this will gel with the flatliner crowd, but it is what it is.
