Thanks guys. So my JL subs came in yesterday. Tricky, (2) f112v2's in a room that is 17x19x9 high with the Salon 2's. I have the subs low pass set at about 50hz. Very square room, but the 2 subs are very hard to locate. This setup gives the Salons the extra low end dynamics (I want). The flexibility of being able to move the subs in this room to smooth out the bass is helpful. I am picking up a McIntosh c2700 tomorrow, replacing my c47. Please, not too much criticism about me going down this rabbit hole.I know I did. More efficient speakers, smaller power amps, perhaps no subs and less money. But the setup sounds good and I want responsible and not leave too much money for the kids. When I get the 2700 in I will give an update on the sound.
Tubes?
I have Revel Salon 2 speakers. Sensitivity is about 85 db. and 4 ohms. They are power hungry speakers. Currently, I am driving them with McIntosh 601's and a McIntosh solid state preamp. I was look looking at a pair of McIntosh MC2301. They are tube amps rated at 300 watts into 2 - 8 ohm loads. I listen to all types of music (sometimes at very high levels). I never run out of power with the 601's, but I am very intrigued with tubes. This may be a misconception, but I remember some friends who played guitar saying, tube watts were louder than solid state? Perhaps this is not really true or not true regarding home stereo. Perhaps the best idea is to keep the 601's and get a good tube preamp? Thanks, Dave
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Hi Dave, In recent years I've had the good fortune of sampling some great amps in large systems, smaller systems in homes plus brick and mortar. Makes include three modern Nelson Pass amps (great,) 300B amps including a tricked out pair of Deja Vu monoblocks, amps designed by the late Roger Modjeski. (I own the RM-10 MKII) and just last week the terrific, obscure, Tom Evans amplifier. Despite these wonderful experiences, my favorite amp remains the post anniversary McIntosh MC275. The only reason I don't own it is because it is beyond my means. To my ears it represents the best of the merging of great tube and solid state sound, as do some of the Pass amps. Happy hunting! More Peace, Pin |
tuberollin
"Yeah, beside tinnitus you are doing irreparable damage to your ears if you listen for very long at 90 dB." I think I'm past that. It may have been the 2nd Black Sabbath concert or the Who, could it have been Pink Floyd? Not sure. But I bet the tweeters in my Salons sound really good. I'm more of a mid range and low end guy myself. |
As was mentioned several times earlier get a tube preamp with octal tubes like the 6sn7, also a tube rectifier. I put a tube preamp in front of my krell amp and it sounds great, it sounded horrible with the solid state preamps I had. I know you can spend big money and get a really good sounding solid state preamp, but in my price range a tube preamp was better than the solid state preamps in the same price range. |
If what you want is a tube amp with some muscle, a solid low end, that are well within your price range, take a look at the Bob Latino M125 monoblock amps from VTA. Available in kit form at $2233/pair or fully assembled & tested at $2955/pair. Totally killer. |
Dave, A simple try might be to relieve your McIntosh 601s from doing deep bass duty to the Revels, letting your new subs do the heavy lifting from say 80hZ down from your preamplifier. I use a Focusrite Clarett 4Pre USB Audio Interface DAC to divide the signal at 80hZ, allowing my 35W per side Music Reference to easily drive my hungry pair of Salk monitors to stadium rock and full orchestral levels. Pin |
If anybody has the balls to do it, an 833-A SET with its grid driven by a tube headphone amp with a transformer output about 600 Ohms and the 1000 Volt B+ to the 833A's through Hammond 1642SE transformer will give you more than enough power. It is not too difficult to build and I will email schematics of how I perfected this. The Hammond transformers are good for 300 ma before the cores saturate and the 833A run at zero grid bias draws about 115 ma. I use this and it is more than enough for my speakers rated at about 85 db. But if you want more, a GM-100 triode run at 4000 to 5000 volts can give you more if you don't mind the finned anode cap offering instant death to anyone who touches it. It was designed in Bulgaria (the same country which sells glow-in-the-dark cloth from which you can sew together a suit to wear when walking from outside sunlight into a dark movie theater to watch a movie about radiation disasters) by some knuckleheads who wanted to call the 833A a wimpy choice of vacuum tube. |
Big VTLs can do justice to your speakers. I've heard them with Wilsons and some other speakers requiring mucho wattage and tough impedances. Only Class A/B tube amps are possible. Otherwise, I would stick with SS. I wouldn't want a low impedance speaker with low efficiency. Even my Acoustats and M.L.s ran great on medium power Class A/B amps without the big dynamics or low bass. I would advise a more efficient speaker or easier to drive impedance. Harbeth's are an example of a low efficiency, high impedance speaker almost anything can drive well. Or, choose a speaker with a built-in amp or assist amp for the bass. They usually can be driven by moderate powered tube amps. |
drbarney "But if you want more, a GM-100 triode run at 4000 to 5000 volts can give you more if you don't mind the finned anode cap offering instant death to anyone who touches it." I remember back in the day, people running big Krell's on power hungry speakers. Then modifying their AC to cool their music room down. Probably with the suits/litigation now, systems like these would require caution signs and a burn kit to stay legal. I do appreciate all of the input. I picked up a McIntosh c2700 yesterday. I'll see how it works out and report back. Dave |
My comments are not theory nor intended to be a blanket statement for all SS & tube amps. This is how things have played out for me over the past decade. I had a Parasound HCA2200ii that is 250x2 or 750x1. I listened to one for several years and then picked up a 2nd to try them as monoblocks. While having both, I took a leap of faith and bought a pair of Audio Research Classic 120s. These are 110 watts each. I did A-B testing against a single Parasound and both. The ARC amps had more volume and an overall sweeter sound in both comparisons. I later bought the Parasound HCA 3500 as I always admired that beast and had the same result....those 110 tube watts still out performed the SS amps. My old preamp is B&K so I later picked up a B&K 200.2 s2 amp that is 250x2. This is my backup amp in case my tube amps have any trouble. I recently had some tubes fail that are way past their expected life. Long story, but I feared there was other issues and took the ARC amps out of the system to consider a trip to the shop. I hooked up my B&K and I just sighed with disappointment. The music simply doesn’t have the realism I get from the tubes. Now I did something weird but it was a cool experiment. The more I thought about the ARC amps, maybe it was simply a bad tube so I should have at least tried swapping tubes before lugging them to a shop. I replaced the bank of 4 where I had some red-plating. I hooked that amp back up for the R channel while the B&K was still running the L channel. I didn’t get the SPL meter out but the R speaker was significantly louder where the soundstage was shifted where the voices were almost centered on the R speaker. I would use the balance and go back and forth and it was remarkable even with just one speaker how much better the tubes sound. I realize I am not in the best class of SS amps here but Parasound and B&K are both well reviewed and respected amplifiers. NOW....the cool factor here, my Platinum Audio Quattro floor standers have an efficiency rating of 86db!! This shouldn’t work, right?!?! What’s going on here. Don’t get obsessed with high wattage ratings. I haven’t heard one, but a friend of mine that has decades of tube amp experience recently got an ARC REF 75. These amps are said to be magical at only 75wpc. He was blown away at the dynamics he gets from his Wilson Audio Sophias. This would most likely be all the power any of us would ever need. If you like your speakers, take the leap of faith and choose a tube amp. You may need to change speakers later, but once you sit back and spend an evening with the music they create, you will never go back! I tried to like SS better as there is no maintenance or worry of tube failure. There is no on-going expense of replacing tubes. All that doesn’t matter as the tubes are simply superior in the music they create....IN MY SYSTEM. Good luck! |
@tobor007 Something you might want to keep in mind is that making an amplifier work hard for a living will result in harsher less involving sound. This is simply because the amp will make more distortion. Tube amplifier power is expensive relative to solid state (which is why the industry went in that direction decades ago) but tubes still offer something that is almost impossible to do with transistors. Smoothness- greater detail and depth... but the problem you are up against is that in most rooms your speakers are near criminally inefficient. What I mean by that is you can count the number of amps that actually sound like music on one hand that also have the power you'll be needing to accurately portray musical peaks. Especially in the case of tube amplifiers, getting bandwidth at the same time as getting the power you need is almost impossible due to the constraints of the output transformer. The more power an output transformer can handle, the less bandwidth it has. Most tube amps of 200 watts struggle to do 20Hz to even 15KHz! To avoid phase shift which affects the soundstage and tonality, you need that bandwidth (or else way more feedback than can be applied to a tube amplifier)! We make an output transformerless tube amp that makes over 500 watts, but its not practical for a speaker like this, I'm thinking mostly out of budget constraints as it costs about $147,000 for a set. But it makes the bandwidth no worries. So if you are wanting the musical aspects that primarily are offered by tubes, you might want to think about getting a set of speakers that are easier to drive! There is absolutely no reason why a more efficient speaker would have any less resolution and you'll certainly experience greater dynamic punch as higher efficiency speakers have less thermal compression; I really can't think of a good reason to have a speaker with such low efficiency. So if you really want to get the most out of your amplifier dollar investment, you'll be doing yourself a huge favor to get something that's a bit easier to drive. To illustrate how important this is, imagine instead of 85dB that the speaker is instead 95dB. The amplifier you would need to make the same undistorted sound pressure would be 1/10th the power! Instead of 500 watt you would only need 50, and there are many 50 watt tubes amps that would suit. The dollar investment goes down- you flush less dollars down the loo and get greater satisfaction out of the system. |
The sound of most but not all tube amps is dominated by the output transformer... yes tube rolling will matter but mostly it’s output which essentially same guys designed your 601 autoformers.... iF you really do like the speakers and the way the sound in your room, work the preamp hard. Definition lost there is gone forever. |
I think Ralph and I have been round the mulberry bush on trading speaker efficiency for distortion - sure you can get higher output but at what cost ? Lightweight cones have breakup modes in the passband, horns ( I own them ) are mechanical multipliers, large baffles same... the astute audiophile just knows which distortion they savor |
Ralph at what cost was a reference to trading one sonic virtue for another. I am elated you have found a truely pistonic set of drivers from 20-33k. Another lap around the Mulberry....at least it is with somebody i deeply respect perhaps it’s definitional, but i think of breakup as signal going one way, cone or parts of cone going the other way...$600 bucks and a run across the German laser scanner is a truth machine... best Jim |
I am elated you have found a truely pistonic set of drivers from 20-33k. Another lap around the Mulberry....at least it is with somebody i deeply respect@tomic601 We’re on the same page with this... and I knew what you were saying when you asked ’at what cost’ but since the speaker I referred to does not seem to have a downside other than size, it actually came down to its actual cost, so my comment was a bit of a double-entendre :) |
its numbers then SS. If its music then tubes. It really is that simple.
^^^^^^^^^^^^ well Richard Gray just insalled my new Millennium tweets and new silver wires from navships,, He suggests the Thrors at 87db are not ideal match for the Jadis Defy7,, He highly recommends i either swap speakers ot swap amp to ss amplification. Told him can'yt part with either.. I think what richard is getting at is, the Thros Excel drivers really prefer ss amplification to work their best... So I may get more dynamics in the upper midrange frenquencies , but lose some of the tubes musical magic,, always a trade off somewhere. ss amplification will never ever work for me. btw Richard is refering to hi fi solid state,, HA,, ya gonna pay for that. Seas, Scan speak offers high sen speakers, but i am a fan of the Excel line. |
As was mentioned several times earlier get a tube preamp with octal tubes like the 6sn7, also a tube rectifier. I put a tube preamp in front of my krell amp and it sounds great, it sounded horrible with the solid state preamps
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ My guess is most high power ss fans , go with this ideal tube pre amp. However a great tube pre ain't cheap. = has to be clean, no coloring,,I just sold off a LS9 chinese Jadis clone 12AT7 3 stage,, clean, pure sonics, , no added color to circuit,,,, with Mundorf caps , $750. = steal, but its goneeee |
I'm more of a mid range and low end guy myself
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I am about to make a topic on just this subject, ss amps voicing the 3 main frequency ranges vs tubes performance in the 3 frequenct phases. Should get alot of discussion going on. I'm busy putting final touches on my upgrades in my entire system,, let me complete, and then I'll start a discussion. Just saying mids are like 90% of the music we listen to. I never make a final judgement on a speaker/amp performance by highs/lows, 'Always mid frequencies is my concern. |
