Upgrading from Wilson Sophia 2's?

Just buy the next pair of used 5A's and be done with it! :-)

Don't you wish that I had sold you mine and not decided to keep them??

I am not so sure that Madfloyd needs to replace the Sophia 2's - he might just need to find some good tube amplification to drive them.

The question is, what would provide the tube magic and work in Madfloyd's dual purpose system? I know he likes the sound of my tube amps (Atma-Sphere MA-1's), but they just won't work in his setup.

George

Madfloyd, are you running 50 ft speaker cables or 50 ft balanced IC's to your monoblocks next to the speakers?

I would second (or third?) the 5As. Try them set up well in your room and I'm guessing you'll stop second guessing your system and just enjoy it. Then again, nothing would surprise me I guess.

I'm running 50 foot speaker cables. While the character of the cable certainly comes through at an extreme length such as this, it's not as detrimental as you would think.

Every once in a while I move my monoblocks beside the speakers (using 50 foot balanced cable between pre and amp) to reassure myself that there is no big night and day difference. Granted I'm typically trying different brand speaker cables, but I don't hear an improvement. In my situation, having the amps up front would be very inconvenient, but I'd find a way to make it work if the sonic improvements were worthwhile; I just don't hear a difference (personally).

I have a VTL ST-150 (that I use in another system) that I tried and the bass was just plain sloppy.

If I remember correctly, damping factor(an amp's control over speaker cone) goes down as series resistance goes up(with longer cables).

So, asking a tube amp(which starts out with a fairly low damping factor, already) to drive extremely long speaker cables is probably a sure recipe for sloppy bass.