Tubes for Magnepan’s.

Since someone got their panties in a twist over my last comment, I will just quietly enjoy the misinformation being spread here. Carry on.

@secretguy  If you had a post removed, its not just that someone got upset. The moderators don't care about that. They do care about forum violations- such as calling someone names (such as 'stupid') or being abusive. If your post was reported (which is usually the only way the moderators find out about a given post) and it was an obvious violation, it will get removed. Most sites have forum rules to which you agree to before you are allowed to post. These are clearly stated on any website.

If you click on the 'report this' link in the bottom right corner of any post, you see a list of the forum violations that bother moderators the most. So as a helpful tip, since name-calling is the most common violation (and I know this because I'm a moderator on another site), use this tactic: 'Attack the post not the poster'. IOW you can call a post 'stupid' (or whatever value you want to assign to it), that's OK. Calling a forum member stupid or the like is something different!

Is there a national show that highlights valve amps?

No. Seems to me in the US, AXPONA and the RMAF as your best shots.

why ,because they take a lot of current to drive then
tube donot have the current on demand that good solid state brings , when you have a speaker going

Power (watts) is equal to voltage times current. If the amp can make the power then it also has the current. You can't have current without voltage- that's the laws of physics. Obviously the above statement is false.


If you want to use tubes and get the bass right on Maggies, first, use a tube amp that has good low frequency bandwidth. Second, use monoblocks so you can keep your cables short, and by that I mean maybe about 1/2 foot. Back the amp up to the speaker and use that short connection- which should also be fairly heavy. We have a lot of customers with Maggies because Magnaplanar is here in town and people want to put our amps on their speakers- both are known for transparency. So I've done this a lot- it works. The usual YMMV due to standing waves in rooms but that has little to do with tubes.

key point is that well built ss amps can double power output into 4 ohms versus their basic 8 ohm load rating... tube amps cannot do this and can struggle to deliver even the same power in 4 ohms versus 8...

Doubling power is not the same as that amp sounding its best.

The reason is distortion- in solid state amps, this tends to be smaller amounts of higher ordered harmonics. Our ears use the higher orders to sense sound pressure and so tiny amounts of that distortion is perceived as harshness and brightness- and quite literally is why tubes are still around.

Steve McCormick has made amps that can easily double power into 4 ohms. But he sent a letter to Paul Speltz (known for anticables and also the ZEROs which are an autoformer) describing how in fact his amps sound better driving low impedance loads using Paul’s ZEROs (www.zeroimpedance.com). I described why above.


Of course, if you have a set of ZEROs to work with your four ohm Maggies, then you can use a tube amp pretty effectively as well. We are in the same town as Magnaplanar and so have a lot of local customers who use our amps with them. Our amps don’t have an output transformer (hence the term OTL) but the combination works quite well. In smaller systems our M-60s get used with the ZEROs.


The bottom line here is that no matter what amp you have, if it is driving a 4 ohm load directly, it will be audibly inferior to how it drives an 8 ohm load or even 16 ohms. The ZEROs are a workaround for this problem.


I know people will say that a big enough solid state amp will do better, but it does not matter the amp, you will see in the specs that its distortion is higher into 4 ohms. Distortion causes colorations (like harshness and brightness); high end audio is all about getting away from that. If you are really stuck on a 4 ohm speaker, consider a set of ZEROs no matter what amps you have.