Revox A740
Overview
Most of what survives on paper about the Revox A740 comes from the margins of the catalog rather than the center of it. A British dealer's price schedule lists it as the "Revox A740 150 W. per ch." power amplifier at £688.50 including VAT, tucked between a Quad 405 and a Nakamichi preamp. A trade-show report from the same era describes the "tasty looking A740 power amp" sitting on the F. W. O. Bauch stand alongside Studer B67 tape machines and the rest of the Revox line. Neither document bothers to explain the amplifier itself. That is the A740 in a nutshell: a component that was clearly sold, clearly handled, and clearly heard by people who knew the brand — but one whose paper trail has thinned to a handful of commercial references.
The 150-watt-per-channel rating is the one hard number that turns up consistently, and it places the A740 firmly in the upper tier of Revox's power amplification rather than the budget end. For a company whose reputation was built on tape transports and tuners, a 150 W/channel amplifier was a statement of intent about the completeness of the A-series system. Collectors tracking down an A740 today are usually trying to complete a period Revox stack — pairing it with the matching preamplifier and tuner of the same generation — rather than chasing the amplifier on its own reputation, because so little independent documentation of its performance survives.
What the A740 is not is a well-documented product. The archive has no confirmed production years, no complete specification set beyond the power rating, no confirmed circuit topology, and no independent measurement data. Anyone writing confidently about its distortion figures, damping factor, or output devices is working from memory or from a service manual the archive has not seen. What can be said with certainty is that it existed, that it was rated at 150 watts per channel, that it carried a retail price of £688.50 in the British market, and that it appeared on the same demonstration stands as Studer's professional tape machines — a placement that says something about how the brand positioned it.
That trade-show context is worth dwelling on, because it is the closest thing to a period verdict the archive holds. When a dealer displays a domestic power amplifier next to a Studer 24-track and a B67, the implicit claim is that the amplifier belongs to the same engineering culture. Whether the A740 lived up to that framing is a question the surviving documents do not answer.
For the collector, the A740 is a completionist's amplifier. It is the piece that makes an A-series system whole, and it is priced accordingly on the rare occasions it surfaces — often inside a larger lot of Revox gear rather than as a standalone listing. Buyers should expect to verify the power rating and the exact circuit configuration against a service manual before committing, because the secondary literature is thin enough that even basic facts circulate by hearsay. The 150 W/channel figure is the anchor; everything else needs checking against the unit in front of you.
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