David Price looks at one of that decade's punchiest integrated amplifiers, the Inca Tech Claymore.

Oh the eighties - remember them well! The Cold War, Maggie Thatcher, Golf GTIs, red braces, the 'tell Sid' campaign. In hi-fi they were turbulent times too. The record companies launched CD with a 'scorched earth' marketing strategy. Valves were about as fashionable as beige Morris Marinas, and the only kind of speaker to have needed half a kilowatt of power to raise a squeak. 

Stimulated by the success of Naimís Nait it was also a time for British muscle amps. The NAIT's nemesis came from Essex's Canvey Island, in the unlovely shape of Inca Tech's Claymore. From a little known company, this £345 amp relied entirely on its superb sonics to gain a foothold in the fast-growing 'super integrated' market. 

By 2001 standards, fit and finish are poor. The chassis and casing are roughly pressed aluminium with a crackle black finish (what else!) on the top and front panel. Two large black knobs take care of volume and input selection, while a couple of rough feeling push buttons offer tape monitoring and mute functions (pure luxury!).  A clunky front panel on-off switch and headphone complete the package. Just as blue LEDs are currently de rigeur, in the eighties every black box had to sport tasteful gold lettering ("nice"), and this is no exception. 

Round the back you get RCA sockets for phono, CD, Aux and Tape sources - paltry by today's standards but to see a CD input on 1985 amps was a revelation. In classic cottage industry fashion, many Claymores came with an empty headphone socket blank on the back panel, covered with nothing more than a piece of Sellotape! Best of all though was the amplifier's underside, which sported both an MM-MC phono gain selector and a vestigial balance control pot (thankfully devoid of a knob). Mad. 

If all this is 'nightmare on amplifier street', then the inside provides welcome relief. The Claymore wins back cool points with a high quality ALPS volume pot, beefy ELNA power supply smoothing capacitors and a muscular toroidal transformer. Circuit layout is clean and relatively simple. You can tell a lot of effort has gone into this aspect of the Claymore's design. Particularly impressive are the super-chunky wires running from the output transistors to the rear panel loudspeaker terminals. 

Plug it in and you get almost all the Naim NAIT's grip and speed with stacks more grunt and finesse. Blending a genuinely sweet, smooth and big-hearted sound with real skin-of-the-teeth transient ability, it actually sounds remarkably modern and can comfortably see off many of today's sub £1,000 integrateds. 

Along with power aplenty, the Claymore can go loud (and quiet) very quickly, making it great at conveying rhythms.You can use it with truly transparent loudspeakers without having to reach for the Paracetamol. It's a remarkably refined and modern sounding design, but it still does the business in terms of musicality and dynamics. And the icing on the cake is its truly superb phono stage that works with both moving magnets and moving coils. 

The good news is that you can pick Claymores up second-hand for anything from £75 to £125, making them far better value than any other 'super integrated'. Later on in life, the finish got a bit better and Inca Tech even did a gold plated version. If sound per pound is utmost, there are few classic amplifiers that can touch it.