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In Reply to: Great Fisher integrated? posted by Mossback on March 28, 2014 at 22:01:04:
Hi
I pretty much agree with Mikey and Eli. I have rebuilt a number of EL84 integrated amps and receivers by Scott, Fisher, Sherwood, Eico, H-K, and too many others to list. I get to listen to all of them before shipping them out. Of course I only hear the first 20 hours or so and things do change for the first 50-100. That said, the little Sherwood S5000 is probably the best of the EL84 integrated amps I have heard. The Scotts are also very, very good. The Fishers are just fine for high level inputs, but as Eli has stated, they tend to have subdued bass response in phono. You are always wanting to turn up the bass control when playing a record. If you rebuild any good el34 amp properly you will be happy. That said, I would find an S5000 if you can, and failing that then one of the Scotts if you value phono. Also, none of them can come anywhere near a properly restored Citation I preamp for phono. At least not to my ears. It is an entirely different animal, but it also requires that you have a good power amp. The Sherwood and Scott phono stages are quite good though and will give you many hours of happy listening. Also, the 7591/7868 versions of Sherwoods are very fine amps and don't get enough love around here. The Scott 7591 based amp is also very good. The Fishers are all quite nice, but I do find the phono section lacking in bass response as was mentioned.
There are a number of sleepers out there too. The Harman Kardon Award series amps are very good and easily modded to make them considerably better if you add a small filament transformer and make a regulated DC filament supply for the phono and preamp tubes instead of hanging them off the cathodes of the power tubes as in the original design. It all fits under the hood and transforms a pretty good amp into a very good amp. I have done this on the A300 and A500 amps.
With any of these amps you need to really get in there and change all the little ceramic disc caps to good film caps. They often used poorer caps as couplers in the phono stage and also on the tone controls. If possible find an integrated that doesn't use PECs in the tone control and/or RIAA circuits. If they do, then try to rebuild them with discrete components on a small terminal strip. Usually you can make it all fit and it will improve things greatly.
All of the above is just my 2 cents from listening to and working on many, many pieces. Feel free to completely disagree. There is a debate on active vs. passive RIAA that pops up here from time to time. Fisher used active and most everyone else used passive. As I said, the Fishers all sound bass-shy in phono to me, but others may disagree. They certainly are not bass-shy on the line level inputs.
cheers,
Don
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- RE: Great Fisher integrated? - dls123 06:55:51 03/31/14 (0)
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