Using PA Speakers In A Home "Audiophile" Application!

Not a sound pro, but an event marketing person who spends time on the stage deck at existing events like DefFest and have dealt with stage manager details, production specs and road crews for 35 years. The input in this thread about the engineering and reliability requirements in touring level pro audio is on the money.

But the hobby history side of all this is fascinating to me…especially the early days when the Dead and the Allmans used early Macintosh and Crown solid state amps get get the combination of volume and reliability they needed on tour.

Our home audio hobby has many flavors and I really got a kick out of building a couple of stereos powered by same amp architecture as the Allmans used at the Fillmore :) Paul at PS Audio is a teller of truth, and he’s probably right saying that these early Crowns have a high end that sounds like breaking glass to his educated ears but I’ve enjoyed creating an Input chain and speaker level output hardware that tames it.

Interesting discussion. Two quick thoughts.

First: Generalizations are only occasionally useful :)

Second: Your own listening habits and hobby goals have a big role in what equipment best serves you. There’s a parallel in the car hobby. People have daily drivers, but also some other car(s) that they drive only on nice days and often spend more time tinkering with it than actually driving it. Ask that person what they expect from the experience…and you’ll get a different answer for the daily driver or the garage queen.

I confess to being one of those “reverse guys” :…with Wharfdale Heritage Lintons and an REL T5i , streaming WiFi through an ESS Sabre DAC, connected with Mogami cables, but I love my high current mid-80s Crown PS-200 amps. They’ve been serviced at AE Techron after early careers in commercial PA sittings, one in a small theater and the other in a church in Virginia. Bought them both on EBay for peanuts. Barely have $1k in them total.

The expertise shared here has been invaluable in refining my home listening enjoyment and taming these amps, but to my ears it’s hard to beat the great damping factor, wide dynamic range and high overhead of these legendary pro-audio workhorses. My Lintons can dip to 3 ohms and the Crowns push 133 wpc into 4 ohms.

This group helped create my sound stage with key advice. The ideal line-in level for older amps is lower than the hot modern DACs generate and once I added an unpowered Shiit preamp to tamp down the gain from my streamer, the Crown delivered amazing imaging.