Marten Coltrane


Need your opinion about Marten Coltrane speakers . What do you think about ceramic mid and woofer speakers? 

farzad
I played around with accuton drivers in a speaker building experiment.  They sounded great with a cheapo cross-over i used.  I would love to audition a pair someday.  Oh well, until then Happy Listening.
We showed this year at RMAF with Zesto Audio gear and the Martens came to life.  The Eros are 150wpc class A tube amps and they handles the Django's wonderfully. 
I owned a pair of Coltrane Alto large stand mounts which have similar sensitivity to the older model Coltrane (87db). With the carbon/kevlar sandwich cabinet and Accuton drivers, the Alto's sound very pure, well damped & fast like an electrostatic speaker, yet with the dynamics of a dynamic speaker. They like plenty of power (think min 200 watts, or a lower watt high current amp with a strong psu's). I initially drove my Alto's with a Classe CAP2100 and they struggled. The Alto's only came to life after I upgraded to a Boulder 1060 which properly controlled the speakers & delivered solid deep bass.

The Coltranes need some tubes in the mix, or tube-like ss amps. I was running a heavily modded Ayon CD-5s as tube linestage with the Boulder & that was a great combination; solid, clean, natural/neutral power from the Boulder with the sweetness and dimensionality of tubes. I can imagine Vitus, Pass Labs or the PS Audio BHK amps would work well. For tubes, I know Einstein Audio & EAR work well. I think the Vac 200iQ mono's would be a great match as well.