300B SET Amp driving Wilson Sabrinas

No surprise at all. Now, turn it up and see what happens. IMHO music should be listen to at realistic levels, but kept below ear damage levels. Many people listen quietly for a number of reasons and might get away with a SET amp. If you really want to hear what glorious sounds like, put a Pass XA 200.8 in there. Any thoughts of set amps will immediately dissipate, even at low volumes.

@carlsbad2  @jasonbourne71 is exactly right. Live music is extremely dynamic. Have you ever been 15 feet from a drum set?  85 dB is for apartment dwellers. Real men listen at 95dB and piss off their wives.  Sabrinas will do this easily, but that amp will choke.  @8th-note 1++ Even with Klipschhorns that amp is not enough. We use to bottom out Stereo 70's on K horns. Marantz Model 9s did the trick. Sounding OK and performing realistically are two separate issues. I do not want "sounding OK" I want the band in my media room. I want to close my eyes and FEEL like I am at a live performance. I is that feeling that makes people want to jump up and dance. "Working" is not good enough. People are entitled to have whatever goal they like with their systems. If listening to a table radio is their goal then a SET amp is perfect and so simple they could easily build one themselves. @ozzy62 is on the path to success. 

@roadcykler ​

@vonhelmholtz has a valid point. Speaker sensitivity is the volume a speaker reaches with a given power at 1 meter. Have you ever seen people listen to their system at 1 meter from the speakers? Volume drops off rapidly with distance especially with point source speakers. This is why larger rooms require bigger more powerful systems. SET amps are for closets and headphones

@ghdprentice The CDC is a totally lost cause. All of these silly studies are assumptions taken by people who hate loud music. Think about it. How do you do a study like that. Are you going to subject people to 95 dB for years to see what happens? How do you know what a person was exposed to, take a history? Do you carry a sound pressure level meter around with you all the time? These are the same people that told us pot makes you sterile and shoved a dangerous and ineffective vaccine down our throats. For 40 years I did comprehensive hearing tests on individuals from every walk of life as a family physician (Not a modern primary car provider) I followed them through decades. Not one of my musicians, who played electric music on stage had hearing loss beyond normal presbycusis. The ones that wound up with hearing aids either had a family history of hearing loss or were subject to a lot of impulse noise from machines and guns. My 72 year old dead head friend still hears fine and I still hear to 16 kHz at last check. I have been listening at 95 dB (when the music calls for it) as long as I can remember. My 95 dB is as measured, dBSPL , not dBFS. Remember dB is a relative scale.

@carlsbad2 I can understand your position. Most systems at 95 dB sound like sh-t. They hurt my ears. But, not because they are inherently bad systems. They are not tuned for louder levels. Mine is tuned for louder levels with the high end being rolled off. Our ears are much more sensitive to high frequencies as volume increases. If your system is balanced at 85 dB it will hurt at 95 dB  Even my wife was vacuuming along to Poco at 95 dB yesterday. 95 dB is not that loud. Many concerts hit 105 dB, twice as loud. Now that makes my ears ring, in go the plugs. At the range I wear 30 dB attenuators made by Etymotic. We saw Mark Lettieri two weeks ago in a theater setting. I would estimate it was around 95 dB most of the time and the sound was wonderful. I did not see anyone wearing hearing protection. What 95 dB does is it gets people up and dancing. 85 dB does not. 

@ghdprentice Experience tells you what is acceptable and what is not. Ears ringing is never acceptable. That is natures way of warning you, you have gone to far. Most of us music lover, concert goer types have made the mistake of going to a concert without hearing protection that turned out to be too loud and our ears rang for a day or two. Peter Gabriel did that to me back in 1982. I have carried hearing protection with me ever since. That concert had to be in the 110 dB range. I am very use to 95 dB and will not tolerate much louder before the hearing protection goes in. You do not want to get close to ear ringing levels. Etymotic makes musician hearing protection plugs that are excellent once you get your ears use to them. They attenuate sound without changing the frequency balance. 

IMHO at 70 - 80 dB you can't even do string quartets justice and you are missing a lot of the joy in music. Get an SPL meter so you have a reference, they are not very expensive at all and $50 gets you a very serviceable one. If your system is balanced at 80 dB it will not be comfortable at 90 dB and this is the main reason people shy away from volume. The analog folks have no good way to deal with it, but with digital signal processing you can make a system balanced at any volume by adjusting bass and treble levels to mirror Fletcher Munson curves. 95 dB becomes perfectly comfortable for anyone not trying to hold a conversation.