The Stage is a great speaker and has the best midrange after Quads based on my personal experience and thus deserves a good amp especially a tubed one. For low price solid State, try a McCormack. |
I am driving my Stages with TRL GT-400 and I love it!!!!!!
I agree with So_good that a *good* 100-150 WPC tube amp can drive the Stage well.
A good tube amp to consider is Audio Valve Challenger. Its sound is lush and seductive. |
Clavil:
The GT-400 is a monster amp and will not sweat driving even the Diva. I was talking about smaller Tube amps Like the Audio Valve Challenger, which would generate 100plus wpc and will work fine with teh Stage and yes with loud Brucknor or other Orchestral pieces. Now, the Stage has its own limit that you cannot exceed even with a 1000 WPC SS amp.
But yes, I have driven the Stage with Krells too and they work fine but I prefer older Krells |
Darkmoebius: Thank you for the well wishes :) |
Darkmoebius: I will shoot you an email how to place the Divas. In order not to disturb this thread, email me privately please your room dimensions. |
In fact, the amount of watts is the issue. The impedence of Apogees speakers, barring the Scintilla, is 4 ohms. So most amplifiers can handle that. It is their low sensitivity that precludes most amps because they will not have the watts to run the speakers at decent sound pressure level.
In the case of the Stage, the sensitivity is a bit higher than other Apogees and also the spaker itself will not play very very loud (althoug it is good enough for most music except very loud rock or large orchestral music). Therefore, a 100-150 WPC good tube will drive it very well to the **Stage's maximum cability**. Having 400-500 WPC will not help any further although will not hurt either.
In the case of other Apogees, a 100-150 WPC *can* drive the speaker for low volume (e.g., vocals) but not for obtaining a good sound pressure level. Hence you will need more power. |
Rrog: Leo is also saying that the Stage impedence will not be problem, which is what I also said. However, you said "while this may not be a problem for your monster tube amplifiers it can be a problem for other amps"
I do not think it will be a problem as any amp with 100 WPC or so will drive the Stage well. |
One of my heroes in audio is Leo Spiegel, the genius at Apogee acoustics who designed the Fullrange ribbon spakers.
In an interview in July 1990, he said:
"In the case of the Stage, we set out to make a smaller loudspeaker, still with a good, accurate sound but with higher efficiency than our previous designs so that it could be employed successfully in a wider range of systems. 'The way I set out to achieve this was by concentrating the amount of ribbon conductor in the magnetic field. A small improvement was also made to the magnet arrays too, but the primary change was to the woofer and tweeter diaphragms, which have a conductor on both front and back of the transducer. Another important, change was to the cuts which transform the bass unit diaphragm into ribbons. The sinusoidal cuts are only practical with the photo etching process used for a relatively high volume model like the Stage since the process will cope with, any arbitrary shape of cut. The smaller volume models are cut by band, so only straight line cuts are feasible. 'The electrical crossover point is about 350Hz, but the effective acoustic crossover point is around 600 to 700Hz as the electrical network is only one element of the transfer function and the characteristics of the ribbon have an effect here too. The blending of the woofer into the midrange/treble ribbon is very gentle. Every time we try a very sharp cutoff, you can bear the sound of the two units as two quite separate entities. It has been the same with everything we have worked with. You can always say 'here's the woofer' and 'here's the mid/treble tweeter'. But gentle crossover slopes demand good overlap in the frequency response, or the technique doesn't work, the units must be well behaved if such slopes are to work successfully".
"The Stage has a very smooth impedance and phase response, especially in the midband and tweeter region which has incredibly smooth group delay characteristics. In this way we can achieve depth and imaging. 'The idea is that you should be able to shut your eyes and sense locations and see the orchestra. We have worked very bard to achieve this. If it doesn't do this, it isn't one of ours. You might find a good receiver of, say, 50 watts/channel output that drives the speakers well, but so what? I think that the fine detail and the quality of the Stage really demand a truly fine quality amplifier. Power isn't the issue here. Quality is. So although the Stage is more widely compatible than previous Apogees we don't condone the use of poor-quality ancillaries anywhere in the chain." |
Rrog: I do not agree with you because you need to re-read the context of my statement, yours and Leo's.
First, you were putting the Stage with all Apogees and saying power does not matter. That needs some clarification.
Second, I said power does matter for Apogees (which means Apogees in general). Then I said **in the case of the Stage**, the impedance and sensitivity is benign and hence less power will suffice (which means *for Stage* power is less of an issue). I also said *for the Stage* more power will not help, which is what Leo is saying. To further emphasize this point, I said for *other Apogees* you will need power.
Leo, my hero, is talking about the Stage, emphasizing its easy load and mentioning exactly what I said, that is less power *for Stage*. He brought up the power issue (because for other Apogees, power is an associated issue) and stressed that Stage is an exception.
Finally, it appears that you think all Apogees have low impedance. In reality, only the Scintilla has one ohm impedance and the Fullrange woofer has 2 ohm if driven without the transformer, while the rest of the Apogees have close to 4 ohm with occasional dips to 3.
The Stage was one of the later speakers made by Apogee Acoustics, and in my opinion pushed the quality envelop further, combining most of the lessons that Apogees engineers had learnt. In my book, it is the best sounding Apogee (based on midrange, highs and transparency) and requiring the least amount of power. Other Apogees however outperform the Stage in other areas.
Hope that helps. |
Rrog: As sogood51 says, 50 WPCs can drive but may be not enough load and may lack dyanmics. When we says power matters (and not matters) it is all relative. The Stage is an easier load as Leo was saying but still need good enough power. |
Rrog: So my answer is even though you may have a 50 WPC amp that can drive the speaker, then so what? The fine detail and quality of the Stage requires a fine quality amp. So for a 50 WPC, numbers may not matter, quality does. And Even though the Stage is more flexible than other Apogees, it will will not work well with poor-quality 50wpc.
Hope you get the point. -)
So the best is to try it out and you be the judge. Do report it here how it went. |
Rrog: My guess is that the Manely should mate well with the Stage.
I am sorry I do not recall our conversation. Apologies. Drop me an email if you have any specific question. With regard to building speakers, I did not build any per se but I moded several Apogees. Two noteworthy efforts are the "Centaur-Fullrange" which combine the Fullrange woofer with Centaur-Major mid/tw ribbon to make a "new" speaker. This remains my main speaker even though these days I am listening to the original Fullrange.
The second project, which shows my love for the Stage, was to create a "butterfly", that is stacked Stages. Each side contains two Stages with the top one upside down such that the Mid/high tweeters of the two Stages are aligned vertically. That project required some more efforts and crossover mod and I abandoned the idea as the bass was not better than that of the Fullrange. I might try it again though when my mod bug starts biting me again. |
Good comment, Lil. I love to engage in such discussions. I own two Fullranges and I agree that it is one of finest speakers ever made. It has got everything: might, power, authority, finesse, romance, subtlety, you name it. However, I have improved it further and I know I am speaking for myself and for my taste.However, the Stage has something that none of the other Apogees have, and that is some magic in the midrange which gives a greater feeling of the singer or instrument being present there. One reason for that could be the Mylar backed ribbon instead of the regular kapton or pure ribbon (but shadowed by transformers). Another reason is the crossover. These factors combined add something into the Stage that is hard to describe in words. Call it audio chemistry :) I never had that feeling with the Diva or other Apogees - certain scintillas come very close though. Now keep in mind that the Fullrange in contrast has its own magic and does not seem to miss anything, and the differences are rather minuet. But if I am listening to vocals only I do not want to stop if it is coming from the Stage. |
LitL: You made another very important point, that is a truly outstanding and revealing system can expose all the drawbacks of a poor recording. That is the case with THE Apogee. I fully concur. So the solution is do not play poor recording on it!! Garbage in, garbage out. The speaker is so ruthless that it conceals nothing. On top of that if your electronics is also of the same calibre, you are asking for more trouble,
The Stage in contrast is more forgiving, which can be a blessing sometimes. Glad to know you also own Stages. By the way, I have also listened to the Stage with a Krell KSA-100 for quite some time and boy do they sound good with a Krell also.
My fullrange is driven by all tubes. Yeap, all tubes. To my knowlege I am the only person on the planet who is driving this speaker with all tubes. Right now the system is bi-amped with TRL GT-800 at the bottom and TRL GT-400 at the top, collectively using 144 tubes.
My system is given here at A'gon:
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1066703453
See details. |
LitL:
If you or your dad are in DFW area, drop me an email and we will setup a listening session at my place. I think I have a good collection of CD and Vinyl but bring your own too.
Krell KSA-100 is a good amp. I am not sure if re-capping is necessary. May be 20 more years later or it is just a hype |
LitL:
In earlier version there was no difference. The original Stage stand was replaced by the subwoofer panel for the Minigrand. The Stage would just atop the subwoofer panel just like it did on the stand. My Minigrand Stages were no different from the other subwoofer-less Stages that I owned. personally, I do not care about the subwoofer panel so much.
However, I have seen slighlt different look of the Stage that came with later versions of the Minigrand. I do not know if there was any sonic difference though. Probably not. |
