Fritz Carrera 7 Be and 300B power amp?


Are low power 300B amps powerful enough to drive Fritz Carrera 7 Be speakers? Would there be a better tube type amp? What tube amps work great with this speaker?

I’m a SS guy but super tubecurious...

ullogu1

My one bit of advice, having heard Fritz in hotels and owning similar sized 2-way speakers is that they really bloom in well treated rooms.  Excess reflections will really make these speakers sound a lot smaller and less powerful.

Also, I would think that having the speakers pointed towards the non-wall would help with tuning / treatments.

I owned the Carrera Be's for over three years and used them with a number of different amps both SS and tubes.  The best sound I ever got from them was with a Supratek Chardonnay preamp and a Music Reference RM-10 tube amplifier. 

Going by specs alone a (apparently fairly easy load) 87dB sensitive speaker paired with a no more than ~8W 300B-based SET wouldn’t wring out the most of such a combo. You could no doubt attain great sound in moderately sized spacings, also at fairly loud SPL’s, but from my chair the real treat of low powered SET’s is using them with very high efficiency, preferably all-horn speakers (i.e.: +100dB sensitivity) where you’re taking advantage of the low distortion and ease of SET’s at fraction of wattages (ideally though I wouldn’t pair SET’s with high efficiency, high power capacity speakers with large diameter, heavy voice coils; these are better off with higher powered SS or tube amps). Driving speakers 15-20dB’s less sensitive - all things being more or less equal load-wise - will require up 100x the amount of power of a given amp, and with only so many wattages from an SET you won’t be using them at their best here. That’s not to say it couldn’t great to your ears regardless, certainly at no more than moderate SPL’s, but you’d be wanting for headroom.

With series crossovers which use much smaller and far fewer parts than regular speaker crossovers, my loudspeakers are very easy to drive with tube amps.  I have 8 push-pull integrated tube amps with EL84, EL34, 6L6, 6550, KT88 & KT90 power tubes with 12 to 80 watts per channel and a 300B amp @ 8 watts, a EL34 single power tube amp @ 5 watts and a Decware EL84 amp with 2.3 watts per channel that drives all of my speakers great in my 14 x 22 ft living room. 

Happy listening...   Fritz


CARRERA BE WITH 2.3 WATT EL84 DECWARE AMP