Tube-amp for Magnepan?

Maggies are not that hard to drive. The types with the magnets on one side only do have a knee in their power response curve due to the fact that the magnetic field falls off at the square of the distance.

Below that knee 50 watts should make them work. I suspect your power tubes are shot.

We have a lot of customers using our M-60 (60-watt OTL) and a set of ZEROs- you should be able to do it with what you have.

Magnaplanar is 30 minutes from our front door. Over the last 30 years we've had a lot of experience with them. In fact, our first prototypes were used immediately on Maggies as that was one of the speakers we were using for reference (Tympani 1Us -that was a long time ago...). Jim Winey has made a point of telling me a number of times that the best he ever heard one of their speakers (MG-20) was with our MA-2s.

I've seen people with our amps have the tubes last a long time. One guy here in town has had the same set for the last 8 years. If using M-60s, most everyone also uses a set of ZEROs. The amps then make 80 watts and run cooler, with greater authority and transparency, and the tubes last longer too.

Its true that if you put a powerhouse 600 watt amp on a speaker like this it will play a little louder, but you will find that at higher volumes the dynamics are compressed due to the phenomena I mentioned earlier. BTW this is not true of the push-pull speakers! I regard the 20.1 as one of the better bargains in high end audio, but this thread is with specific regard to the MG-2.

Macdadtexas, the thread here is about tube amps, and that's **White** Bear Lake. I mentioned that they are close simply because they have a lot of customers locally and there has been plenty of opportunity to hear them with our gear- we may well have more Magnaplanar customers with our gear here than anywhere else...

In fact is that Magnapans have never been our first choice due to impedance. Nevertheless we find a lot of Magnapan users that want to run OTLs and vice versa. Maybe they want to combine the transparency of the speaker with that of the amps. The guy that founded the Magnaplanar Users Group over on AudioAsylum.com (a customer of ours) says that our MA-1 was the ideal amplifier for the 3.6.

Another amplifier that has been used with Magnaplanar a lot over the years is ARC. They too are local. Just because Magnaplanar uses a particular amplifier at a show is not an endorsement that they think that that particular amp is the 'best'- but I would expect that it **is** an endorsement that the amp works well with their product.

Here are some recordings that also have impressive deep bass:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/awards/bya/index.html

Yes, ElectroKardiogramm has the subterranian bass that won the LP its status. I have seen this cut separate the wheat from the chaff a number of times :) BTW the 20.1 does a great job with it.