Subwoofer for Ayre AX-7e?

@tomic601 transmission lines are the bomb. I haven't heard the Vandersteen but have heard a couple of Bud Fried's old designs, as well as the Role Audio models. They have a tuneful bass quality that's unique to the alignment.

Agree it's always a good call to contact the manufacturer. Fairly certain the answer will be the same as what has been discussed here though. I scoured the internet and experimented a ton looking for alternative solutions, only to find Charlie Hansen in another forum outlining basically what I said above. Not much you can do to get around the circuit topology. *shrug*

taww

ya man, for sure...for a brief period a store i worked at in late 70’s carried Frieds
.....so right..they were good....we had them, Thiel and Shahinian....

well the circuit topology is a big part of the Ayre magic, along with lack of feedback...Charloe was not shy on posting, so my guess is you got tge approach right...RIP Mr. Hansen

good luck on your quest

Cool, I’ll look into the 1Ci ... price is right for what it purports.

@taww: Thinking about your remarks re: limitations of the Ayre single-ended. I’ve wondered what I’m losing running my RP8-->Lehmann Decade single-ended-->Ayre. My Schiit DAC running balanced into the Ayre brings me to tears. But I feel like I’m never really going to hear vinyl totally right unless I figure out a balanced path. So, what, I save next for the P-5xe, too? Grr.

@taww, thanks for the good info. Between the commonality of circuit ground and chassis ground and your finding that the RCA inputs are apparently treated as if they were balanced the design is certainly different than what I was envisioning. So, yes, my suggestion of connecting a sub’s negative speaker-level input terminal to the ground shell of an RCA input connector would not be suitable, for either you or the OP.

Just as a matter of curiosity, though, I wonder if the tape out RCA connectors are being provided with a balanced pair of signals, or if (as I would expect to be more likely) the ground shells of those particular connectors are connected to circuit ground. Although even if those ground shells are connected to circuit ground it would seem unlikely that connecting the negative sub wire to one of them would provide any benefit compared to a chassis connection, given that you’ve found chassis and circuit ground to be common.

Best regards,
-- Al

great thread guys. It's funny, because it made me think of what system I'd put together for a second room in the house.  I'd probably get the Vandersteen 1's and then a Belles Aries integrated or another used Ayre AX7e with Audioquest Rocket speaker cables and then a good source.  

The cool thing about the 1's is that they scale up really well.  I have a friend who has them and has put them in his main system on occasion (all top Audio Research ref gear) and marveled at how good they sounded.  To me that's a wonderful test to see how good a speaker really is.  I loved those old Bud Fried designs.  Thanks for bringing up that name.