By the time I was born in the early 2000s, the brands that still built things with care were already dead.
If you wanted something good, you'd have pay stupid money for "top of the line" goods or scour thrift stores for equipment made decades ago.
My father owned a Sansui AU-217. He bought it as a teenager and blasted Van Halen's 1984 the year it dropped. I was using that same amp nearly 30 years later.
I loved the sound that thing produced. It was warm and rich with a smooth, detailed midrange. The bass was weighty, but never "too much".
I learned later that warmth came from Sansui's tube-amp heritage. When they made the move from tubes to solid-state designs, they built the sound around that warmth.
Years later, I was looking for an amp to scratch the itch that Sansui had left behind. At the time, I was working in the tech section of a local shop which sold AV equipment. A lot of the stuff there was priced in the thousands, but my employee discount of cost + 5% usually brought the price down to a couple hundred. At this point, we only sold two brands of amplifier -- Onkyo and Denon.
I hated them. They're cheap, mass-market shit. They have no weight to them at all. The buttons and knobs are flimsy, and they sound like garbage. No way was I going to spend any amount of money on them.
So I waited. I wanted a Sansui.
After a year of "here and there" searching, I came across a listing for a Sansui AU-X901 here in my own home town. I secured it right there. Pure luck. The X901 was underrated for its time.
In the mid 80s, Sansui's reputation was suffering. They were losing sales to other big players in the industry (Sony, Pioneer, etc), and were producing cheap, bad quality amplifiers. In the late 80s, Sansui decided to try and make a comeback to the HiFi market. Their answer was the X901. Despite the great spec and amazing sound, most people passed it up. It wasn't years later that people realized how good these amps really were, and they turned into something of a collector's item.
In 2001, Sansui closed its main office.
A year or two ago, I was searching for a cheap monitor for my desk. I found one on Amazon for $200. Sansui brand. Someone bought the trademark and slapped it onto whatever came out of the factory that week.
