SOUND QUALITY
The MC805-As were, not unsurprisingly, as sweet and pure in their treble as you could either imagine or hope for. To say they had liquid treble would barely do them justice. It is only when you hear cymbals ringing with such sonorous purity that the justification of amplifiers like this becomes apparent. If valve amplifiers produce treble that is easier and more convincing in its timbral character than transistor amplifiers, then SEs like the MC805-As take the whole process a step further, with a quality rarely encountered elsewhere. These are amplifiers that charm your ears, not chew them.  As you might expect there is no sign of top end brightness or harshness, but at the same time these amplifiers reach 38kHz and there is not the slight sense of warmth that comes from  a roll off above 15kHz or so caused by the distributed capacitance in the giant winding stacks of high power output transformers.
    A deliciously lucid yet fast midband quality had Renee Fleming singing clearly just in front of the loudspeakers with a tactile presence that only valve amplifiers can manage. The amplifiers also painted up a gloriously wide sound stage on which instruments and singers had a rich and intense presence, even at full left and right. I recognised this as a property of the MC300 preamplifier, a highly specialised design tuned right up to the limit using specialised valves and components. Like all Single-Ended amplifiers the MC805-As gave a big, solid feel to singers and instruments, placing them onto a sound stage that fell away backwards, giving a feeling of great depth. 
    With low damping factor valve amplifiers like these, bass quality depends much upon the acoustic and magnetic damping in the loudspeaker I have found. I used the MC805-As across a wide variety of loudspeakers, including World Audio Design KLS9s, Spendor S8es, Tannoy DC8Ts and Linn Aktivs. They gave strong, well controlled bass with all these loudspeakers except the Spendors, which are under-damped and boom with valve amplifiers. Valve amplifiers generally sound fuller bodied than transistor amplifiers, but the MC805-As took this a stage further and could thunder when volume was turned right up.