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The Audio Alto R101 : A special speaker for SET amplifiers and small acoustic spaces

My review on the Audio Alto R101 speaker just went up on the Stereo Times website. It was a pleasure to review this "petite" single driver floor-standing design because of it's overall beautiful musicality, amazingly good overall dynamics, and finally it's excellent top and bottom frequency extension. If you love tube based SET amplifiers or low power Solid State amplifiers (think Pass Labs XA-25) and have a relatively small acoustic space this might be a great speaker for your system. Take a look at the review for all the details that led me to this conclusion.  
teajay

Showing 2 responses by teajay

teajay OP
1,655 posts
 
Hey atmasphere and timlub,

Normally, I would agree with both of you regarding having to have a higher sensitivity for a speaker to really have a SET amplifier "shine" in it’s performance. However, when I ran the experiment in a medium sized acoustic space with my Triode Lab 2A3 SET amplifier (maybe three watts per channel) during the reviewing process, the R101s with this superlative "flea watt" amplifier sounded terrific and I got the volume levels I wanted with no attenuation or distortion at all.
teajay OP
1,655 posts
 
Hey lula,

Your asking me to compare" applies" to "oranges" with these two wonderful performing speakers.

1) The Perfect Set has a 12" woofer, so it will go deeper and produce more bass then the single driver R101.

2) The R101 is not lean in the upper bass/lower midrange region. Therefore, it is surprisingly good at presenting the power band of the music for such a small single driver design.

3) The Perfect Set is not a small footprint speaker. The R101 is quite minute and would fit into and sound better in a much smaller acoustic space.

Both are excellent speakers, but serve different design goals and space requirements. 
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