Avantgarde Trios, SETs, and Impedance Curves

I have a friend with the ART PX-25- its not bad on the Trio at all. There are no 45-based SETs that can drive the speaker- try as you like, 0.75 watts is not enough...

Most people I know that are driving the speaker successfully use surprisingly large amplifiers given the efficiency of the speaker. This is probably due to the impedance curve, which is tricky for a lot of zero-feedback amps (which otherwise will be the best sounding on a speaker like this).

I should mention the Zanden 300B sound the best on many types of music from the midrange up - detailed and musical - but just sound anemic down below. If there was a way to biamp the speakers, or otherwise adjust the bass quality, I would stick with the Zanden. I tried biamping with Lamm and Zandens, and it sounded really wacky. I also tried left speaker with Lamms, and right with Zanden (ok, shoot me), and sounds surprisingly OK if I'm sitting in some off-axis position and don't mind the different sonic signatures - the brain somehow compensates after a while.

I have Trio Omegas with double and now I'm using triple 225 subs. At first I used a Berning Siegfried and it was wonderful except for the huge turn on and off thump it had. It's not sensitive to impedance like most OTL's or SE amps. Now I have some Butler Monads and they were as good as the Berning and dead quiet too so I sold the Berning. Now I have a Tube Distinctions 15watt SE amp that is outstanding but haven't had time to compare it to the Monads. It's way more engineered than the TEAD Linear A. I could be happy with either but one of these days I'll have to do a shootout. I'd love to try the First Watt F3 also and may do that since they have a return policy.

Hi Theloveman,

sorry for the slow answer.

I am using only one REL sub and yes it can go up enough, the REL Studio III can not do this but the Stentor can. My room is only twentysomething square meter with some tricky furnitures. My listening level is not too high, so I never felt I need more sub. The only amp which was as good to my music listening habit as the Altmann, is the EAR-Yoshino 834T integrated, which I was using between the Altmann and the Kageki for few months.

I just got a DEQX digital crossover/room corrector and planning to try a multi-amp, digitally crossed system where one amp (Altmann BYOB with Altmann Attraction DAC from the digitalout of the DEQX) drives the Trio less sub and the other, sub way is driven by the DEQX as well through another Altmann DAC to the line level input of the REL. This way an almost perfectly timed integration is possible between the Trio and the REL sub. I hope so :-)

Hi Ferenc,

Thank you for your response.

Given that your listening level isn't very high, I can understand you're not needing the additional sub, but I am convinced that there is a lot of ambient information in the low frequencies that can only be reproduced in stereo. This element can lend a lot towards realism.

Obviously from your prior posts, you've had considerable experience with tube amplification on the Trios, so I am curious if you find the Almann to be the equal of the tube amps in terms of instrumental weight, body, timbre, and harmonic richness? These are the areas that I typically find solid state amps fall short of a good tube amp.

My room is similar in size to your own, so perhaps the Altmann BYOB would provide adequate power for me as well, though I may listen a bit louder than you on some occasions. I am surprised that since you like the Altman so much, you didn't decide to triamp the Trio with the DEQX providing the crossover and EQ for each of the three drivers. In my mind, the phase and timing errors between the three horns could be completely corrected with the DEQX, and I would think that since those timing and phase errors occur at frequencies where the human ear is considerably more sensitive, they would be far more audible than the ones between the Trios and the woofer.

Of course, you'd have the added cost of two more BYOB amps, but even the cost of three of them isn't as much as most SETs. I do wonder if you could run 3 amps without compromise on one large car battery? If these amps sound as good to me as they do to you, I'd love to try that myself.