pontifex4

Ed, in my opinion, yes: the newer stuff from Alpine has been so watered down that the specs are practically meaningless. To anchor this in my own recent experience (and I am by no means an Alpine expert), the new super small-footprint PDX series amps are noticeably hard to listen to unless you're exactly right with the level of signal you give them. In the car I did with them, this meant that it was hard to use the head unit's volume control, and the owner (thankfully he's a friend -- I haven't installed professionally in a decade) has resorted to changing the volume with a secondary EQ to keep the sound right.

That may be overstating things a little, but generally, the better the amp, the more forgiving with respect to signal level, etc.

There are a lot of other great amps out there, too, and it would be sort of cool to build a 'period-correct' system. Hmmm...

Crazy Eddie

Ya know, the achilles heel of my system, when I look back, was placing the ADS S7's in the rear speaker location ... Besides having to trim a small piece of metal off, to get them to fit, (no big deal), I never put any sound deadening material behind them, in that rear cavity (where the rear fender starts ). That along with the throw of the speaker, into the rear body panel IMHO caused a very vibrating type sound, which I wanted to fix some day ..The throw was such, that I glued rubber soap erasers on the body of the car itself (behind the speaker body panels and in front of the speakers to act as a spacer, so the speakers throw wouldn't hit it ... It's like the old adage 10lbs of **** in a 5 lb bag.... The S7's sounded great in an enclosure but in that crappy location it didn't do it justice... With the amps I have, I wont win any blasting contests for sure, but it sounded real clean .. I could have used another 20 watts in each location and that would have been perfect..
I will take some measurements of the rear area and see what I can fit .. maybe after I get this heap running and I can pick your brain or you come across something that would fit and you think its the right fit, I may pull the trigger ....
All the best
Ed