I have used an older Mark Levinson ML-9 for my amp. I don't consider myself an Audiophilist but borderline towards one. It just has a very natural, unforced sound quality, that I find particularly appealing. If it has one fault, it is that it lacks the bass slam and weight of the killer Krell and Levinson's, but I think you'll have to spend a lot more money to get the kind of sound quality you get from the V-3. In short, an awesome product which gets five stars within its price class.
Musical reproduction is the task of any amplifier.
Musical purity is themotivation for the Ayre V-3 amplifier. Look at how an amplifier creates the signal it sends to your loudspeakers. Conventional designs use many stages to arrive at an adequate final level of amplification. However, with each additional stage, and each new copy, the original signal is slowly degraded from its original form. With the use of extremely high quality FET transistors throughout, the number of stages used in the V-3 are minimized to a total of three simple stages, passing on every detail that was caught in the original recording.