Best Cheap Amps for Magneplanar Speakers

dlcockrum, no shooting here, especially at you.
Didn't see that in the opening, but at your suggestion, did see it further down. I'd argue that one could buy used, and resell, all for the cost of shipping. Perhaps, even that's stretching this budget.
But, really? Might be a case of wanting a big dog, but not being able to afford to feed it.
Happy New Year!

Nord One zup

Absolute best bang for the buck: ATI 1502 amps. Buy a pair of them for 600-700 bux and run them as monoblocks.

People will ask about your funny looking amps and then when you crank the music they won't have any more questions.

One of the unsung heros of audio world.

Or you could just spend an awful lot more money before you approach the sound quality of these puppies.

Maggies draw tremendous current from an amplifier which can cause the internal power supply voltages to fluctuate dramatically in response to the music. This reduces the power from the amp and causes the distortion and bias to be modulated by the music. 

One of the best amps that deals with this is the Sanders Magtech, one of the only amps available with a regulated power supply, and is a great match for Magnepans.

The Sanders magtech is $5,000 so outside the scope of this thread - unless they have a less spendy one I'm not aware of.  It is also designed to drive wildly varying impedance loads of electrostatic speakers.  maggies, while planars, are NOT electrostatics and present a simple 4 ohm load across the freq. range.  They certainly can use a lot of oompah but are a lot 'kinder' to amps than electrostatics.

If I decide to replace my somewhat elderly Sunfire with something at the $3k or above range, it might be the new Benchmark...

Thanks everybody for the responses!  And have a good new years.