In the realm of vintage Hi-Fi, few pieces of gear are as immediately recognizable as silver-faced Pioneer components. The heyday of these was 1975 to 1980 and there are plenty of Web sites dedicated to them. John Week’s site is packed with great information on these units, as is the Silver Pioneer site HERE.For the SA-8500, terrific industrial design met great electrical engineering to produce a robust, 60 watt-per-channel integrated amplifier that still sounds great after 33 years. This particular model had a few minor scratches and a little static on the function selector, but sounded terrific, and looked great with the TX-9500 tuner (look for it in tomorrow's post). Love the confident snap of those hefty toggle switches!
I had this sitting on my workbench for about a month, hooked up to my pair of test speakers – Bose 201’s. Why use Bose speakers for testing? Ever fry a pair of speakers by plugging them into an amplifier with a DC offset of 75 volts? Exactly. See, I don’t like Bose, so frying these would just rid the world of one more pair of them. Of course then I’d have to find another pair of junky speakers. . .easy enough – Bose are all over Craig’s List! Anyway, while this amplifier was on my workbench, my cat discovered it and seemed to always know that when the music stopped, it would soon be cool enough to curl up on top of it. It became his "spot" for about a month. Then one day, in typical cat fashion, he abandoned it – never went near it again. I think I’ll bring the Bose down and introduce them as scratching posts.
Point worth noting, cat hair CAN make its way into vent holes, sticking to transformers and goopy circuit boards, and it takes a LOT of compressed air to clean it off.
Have any photos or stories about your Pioneer SA-8500? Please leave a comment or email me, and I’ll share them with the HiFiCollector.com community.
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