I own a 2200 Power Envelope which I bought new and sat in my basement for 20 years up until about 6 months ago. I have not had looked at, but seems to play well. The amp is driving a pair of Vandersteen 2CE Sign 3 and 1 Rel T/9i. Vandersteens are not efficient and love power. One option is to acquire another 2200 PE to bridge and land around 400 WPC but not sure how much it would cost to service/upgrade. A decent 2200 PE will set be back around $500.00 USD. The other option is get a set of Schiit Vidar (https://www.schiit.com/products/vidar) for about the same power, but at a cost of about $1,400.00 USD.
Any comments or advice on this would be appreciated.
I think that it would behoove you to do a search on this site (ASR) of this review:
NAD 2200 Vintage Amplifier Review
and read the full review:
I find it highly unlikely that the power of one NAD 2200 would be an issue with most speakers, including the relatively inefficient Vandersteen 2CE Sign 3's & the REL T/9i, however, if you are driving a setup involving more than one pair of these, you might want more. (For reasons of my own [which are not necessarily logical] I run one each in the bridged mono 4 ohm mode for both the L & R channels and one in the stereo mode {into a pair of custom subs that are 2 ohm}).
These are excerpts from a test by ASR (in this case: Amirm) of one of my NAD 2200 IDENTICAL TRIPLETS that was sent to ASR (Amirm) for testing after all three of mine had passed through Peter's hands at Quirk Audio. (and a picture of my NAD 2200 TRIPLETS at Quirk Audio)
It is power measurements where the magic of this amplifier comes to life so let's look at that with 4 ohm load first:
We can see a kink in distortion when we hit 200 watts as the unit sails past that to produce whopping 337 watts per channel, both driven! Per design characteristics, you can have much more during momentary peaks:
Wow, we have one kilowatt of power coming out of this amp in short duration!
Lab Input Measurements
I was surprised that the frequency response was not flat but was relieved to see later in the thread that this is due to insertion of low and high pass filters. So here is the frequency response with Lab input that doesn't have such a filter:
Response now (in green) as it should be, ruler flat to below 10 Hz, and well extending past the 40 kHz limit of this measurement.
Zoomed:
And signal to noise ratio:
Conclusions
Nice to see innovation like this from equipment that is over 30 years old! Shame on manufacturers that produce amplifiers for much less power, more distortion and higher prices these days. No, you don't get a fancy case here and sheet metal is strictly budget category. But you are not going to sit on the amp. The guts are where it matters and NAD 2200 delivers.
NOTE: the output relay on stock 2200 gets corroded and fails over time. There are videos and DIY threads on how to upgrade the relay there to fix the problem. The unit tested here has that fix. Other than that, there are not reports of many other reliability issues even though NAD products are often said to be less reliable than other brands.
Overall, I am happy to recommend the NAD 2200. I almost gave it the highest honors but given the upgraded nature of the test unit, and the fact that used amps may have issues, I avoided that. But you could have easily pushed me to give it the golfing panther.