Kenwood KA-7100 Vintage Amplifier Revisited

One of the amplifiers I own is a Kenwood KA-7100 stereo amplifier. It is a fairly old amplifier (late 70’s), with a modest 60WPC into 8ohm specification. I was a fan of the KA-XXXX amplifier series and its siblings from the moment I first heard its smaller brother (KA-601). While that KA-601 was in fairly bad shape, I was amazed at the time by how much better it sounded than my (back then) modern Denon AVR HT receiver. I’ve since had an opportunity to listen to quite a few amplifiers from this series including the KA-7300, KA-8100, KA-9100, and others. Therefore, when I’ve had the chance (more than a decade ago) to get my hands on a KA-7100 I grabbed it right away. It wasn’t in bad shape, but it has seen better days, no doubt. As I learned a bit more about electronics, that amplifier became one of my first projects.
I have recently had the opportunity to revisit this amplifier by doing another small modification, which gave me an opportunity to write something about it, and add some measurement results while at it.

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