To Lewinski and others thinking about multi amping please consider this.
The crossover in a typical two or three way speaker is entirely responsible for widely varying impedance, distortion and is just a bad idea in a high end system. Its fine if you need a speaker you can carry around and hook up anywhere, but we aren't doing that in our stationary home systems. We have the option of doing something much better.
Dynamic drivers have very flat impedance over their useful range. I know and hope I will get some disagreement on this, so go ahead.
For all the money people invest in expensive speakers and amplifiers there is a much better solution. If you don't care to make your own speakers then ask the maker whose speaker you like to "hold the crossover and give me direct terminals to the drivers".
Then get a good active crossover or have one made. Many of us offer them. Choose some amps approiate for those drivers like Lewinski is doing. You will have a great system, no impedance problems, no crossover saturation or the EQ tricks that are going on in most of them to obtain good frequency response at the expense of flat impedance.
I would hope that many of the readers here are tired of searching for the right amp for their speaker. I think that's a fools errand because the information is hard to find, some amplifier makers don't tell the truth, and most speaker makers assume you have a big SS amp with infinite damping, 60 amps of current just like they do.
Here are a few examples of what you can do.
Drive your woofer with some inexpensive big SS amp, don't sweat the midrange, there wont be any here.
Drive the high efficiency midrange with a small tube of class A SS amp. Small amplifiers always sound better than big amps used at low power.
Drive the tweeter similarly or use the midrange amp with a simple 6dB per octave passive crossover consisting of a choke and cap. Properly done these will not affect the drivers of the load. At these frequencies both the choke and cap are small, easy to obtain and have vanishingly small losses. Such a crossover will sum perfectly.
If you are into ESLs, DIrect drive is the way to go. 5,000 volts at 1/4 amp is 1250 VA and equivalent to a 1250 watt SS amp which is what many ESLs need.
The crossover in a typical two or three way speaker is entirely responsible for widely varying impedance, distortion and is just a bad idea in a high end system. Its fine if you need a speaker you can carry around and hook up anywhere, but we aren't doing that in our stationary home systems. We have the option of doing something much better.
Dynamic drivers have very flat impedance over their useful range. I know and hope I will get some disagreement on this, so go ahead.
For all the money people invest in expensive speakers and amplifiers there is a much better solution. If you don't care to make your own speakers then ask the maker whose speaker you like to "hold the crossover and give me direct terminals to the drivers".
Then get a good active crossover or have one made. Many of us offer them. Choose some amps approiate for those drivers like Lewinski is doing. You will have a great system, no impedance problems, no crossover saturation or the EQ tricks that are going on in most of them to obtain good frequency response at the expense of flat impedance.
I would hope that many of the readers here are tired of searching for the right amp for their speaker. I think that's a fools errand because the information is hard to find, some amplifier makers don't tell the truth, and most speaker makers assume you have a big SS amp with infinite damping, 60 amps of current just like they do.
Here are a few examples of what you can do.
Drive your woofer with some inexpensive big SS amp, don't sweat the midrange, there wont be any here.
Drive the high efficiency midrange with a small tube of class A SS amp. Small amplifiers always sound better than big amps used at low power.
Drive the tweeter similarly or use the midrange amp with a simple 6dB per octave passive crossover consisting of a choke and cap. Properly done these will not affect the drivers of the load. At these frequencies both the choke and cap are small, easy to obtain and have vanishingly small losses. Such a crossover will sum perfectly.
If you are into ESLs, DIrect drive is the way to go. 5,000 volts at 1/4 amp is 1250 VA and equivalent to a 1250 watt SS amp which is what many ESLs need.