Just got my Parasound 2145. First listen, it is fine. May be a tad bright, but my sub is not hooked up, so a balance maybe. Bream's guitar stays clean. Joan Baez sounds natural. Not done Harry James yet. For the sale price, $600 on my door step, pretty tough to beat. The other amp I had my eye on is the Schiit Vidar. Is it the equal of the HCA1500 when new? Difficult to say. That series had parts no longer available. I would love to see the schematic on the new one to see what they did. Big transformer, but very small caps. Still can't bring myself to a class D. March was the possible choice for an N-core.
Great old used amps, but the all need a lot of work. As I found, some replacement parts are NLA or can only bought in lots of 10,000 with a 6 month lead. I am re-engineering the power supply in my MOSFET amp and my Nakamichi pre. Distortion on both is higher than I measured years ago, so if they can be made up to snuff I do not know for sure. Nak PA-5, Adcom, Aragon, HCA-2200. Yea some really nice amps in the day. There was a small rare Krell before they got insane that was really good.
I see those who contest you can't beat the specs of the new class D. I agree in objective specs, but I am still not sure we know what to measure. A good example was the null test Hafler proposed. It petty much said his amps had no audible distortion, yet they were different in sound than others. Not only that, I was able to improve on them some while doing similar things to a Rotel and then they sounded closer. I wish I could spend some time with the better affordable class D, maybe I'll change my mind, but I want the safe route. None to be borrowed/heard around here.