It did run very hot indeed, and unfortunately, the lightweight plastic controls on the front of the amp gave the impression that it wasn’t very well built. I bought one back in 1984 when it first came out and it sounded reasonably good, but I replaced it pretty quickly with an Audiolab 8000A which had a hugely better build quality, sounded significantly better to my ears, and is still running flawlessly all these years later in one of my systems.
I still have the A1 tucked away in a cupboard somewhere. It was only used for a year or two, but I suspect it would not still be working today had it been in constant use.
I got 30 years good service from my A1 before it failed to power up one day last year, and that includes taking it to America amd having it converted to run off 120v and converted back to 240v when I came back to the UK. It was a simple and inexpensive repair and it is now out on loan to a friend and still sounding good. I should be thankful that it did fail though because if it hadn’t I’d probably never had started out on my Naim journey.
