Adcom GFA-545, good or bad? How to hook up

BaggedLancer

Well, as some of you know, and some of you don't, i work for 1-800-Got-Junk. I find all kinds of neat and interesting things from vinyl records to high end audio. Today I get to come home with a perfect working Adcom GFA-545 power amp, 2 channel. When asked why she was disposing of it, "my husband died and i dont want it, throw it out".

Now, the question is, should I hook this up to my home theater or sell it in favor of a different amp?

I am not too familiar with hooking something like this up, so some pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark

george daniel

Not a bad amp,hook it up and give it a try,,do you have pre-outs on your avr?

dorokusai

Great amp, check it out for awhile and decide what to do later.

heiney9

I have one currently and I bought it new about 20 years ago. They are very good to excellent amps, IMO. If you need an owners manual (which will help explain hook-up) go to

www.adcom.com

and follow the links. It can be hooked up through the pre-out on a std receiver (assuming your rec has that option) or if you have a pre-amplifier it can be hooked in place of your current amplifier.

Some things to be very careful of are hooking any component up while the power is turned on. Make sure anytime you make a connection to the input (RCA jacks) or to the speaker terminals all power is off on all components.

Also do not turn on the amp if the RCA cables leading out of the amp aren't terminated into a piece of equipment the same goes for speaker wire hooked to the amp and not terminated into a speaker. If the power is on and any of those wire touch you most likely will blow the amp or cause serious damage.

If this sounds like a 3rd grade class, I'm sorry, but since you asked how to hook it up I'd rather cover points that to some are more than obvious but perhaps to others aren't so obvious.

If you have a receiver and it has no pre-outputs or you don't own a pre-amplifier you will not be able to use the Adcom until you get one or the other.

Have fun and enjoy the amp.

H9

BaggedLancer

Thanks heiney. Here is a pic of the back of my denon. It appears that I do have the surround, front, and subwoofer pre outs.

http://www.homecinemachoice.com/reviews/hccreviews/Amplifiers/Denon/DenonAVR-2801_rear.jpg


Sorry I am a complete newbie at this stuff but I wanna make sure its done once, and done correctly.

cfrizz

Yup you can do it! Just get some rca's plug them into the L/R preouts on both the amp & the Denon, hook up the speakers to the amp & rock on!!!

BaggedLancer

Mmmm sounds like a plan. Looks like today I made myself a good find.


Couple months ago i got a nakamichi receiver and adcom 5 disc changer, today the eletronic luck struck again!

heiney9

BaggedLancer wrote:

Mmmm sounds like a plan. Looks like today I made myself a good find.


Couple months ago i got a nakamichi receiver and adcom 5 disc changer, today the eletronic luck struck again!

Which Nak receiver? The early SR and TA series were excellent recevier's even by todays standards. The output section (Stasis was developed and licensed by Nelson Pass a very soild amp guru/engineer/designer) Also Adcom made 2 carousel type changers. I believe they were models GCD-600 and GCD-700. They were no slouches either especially the 700 changer, excellent DAC's and internals for a changer. If they still work give them a listen.

Sounds like you might have gotten a hold of some good stuff, that rivals many of today's mass marketed crap.

As Cfrizz stated use pre-outputs on your reciever (pull out the jumpers L & R) use RCA type cables hooking the other end up to the amplifier input (L & R). What this does is take the low level signal form the pre-amplifer section of your Denon receiver and rather than routing it to the internal amplifier section of the Denon re-routes it thru the pre-outs so the signal goes into the Adcom amplifer, so you now need to hook up your speakers (main L & R) to the Adcom amp.

See how that works.

H9