I would not consider myself a distortion nut. My current AB amp does < 0.03 % THD+N at full rated power, 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The Benchmark and Mcintosh are a few orders better than that and better signal to noise but my ear can't tell the difference. But I don't think I want to introduce a ton of distortion to get an external VU. The McIntosh is pretty sexy and so was the old Onkyo m-500 and m-5000r series. I don't know why the feature fell out of favor.
