an Autoformer would work, because it’s one of the only speakers that presents a very benign 3-4 ohm impedance load.This statement ignores the fact that loop feedback compensates for this sort of thing.
Atmasphere, regarding your link:That has to do with the intentions of the speaker designer. In a general fashion, another way to answer this is that most speakers with highly reactive loads are Voltage Paradigm devices and so the answer would be 'yes'.
1. In general do reactive speakers match better with voltage paradigm amps?
2. What happens to linearity with a voltage paradigm amp? Does the sp increase where the ohms dip (ie watts increase)—with an increase in distortion—and decrease where the ohms increase?Linearity usually refers to distortion... to the latter question, the sound pressure should stay constant, while the power input fluctuates.
3. Same question as above, but with power paradigm amp. What happens to sp where ohms dip or increase...is it the opposite of voltage paradigm amps?If the amp is on a speaker that is designed using Power rules, the output will vary only a little since the designer isn't expecting the amp to throttle its output power back on higher impedances. A good example of this phenomena is an electrostatic loudspeaker, whose impedance is based on a capacitor rather than the impedance of a driver in a box. The idea here is that distortion is kept down, with a preference for lower distortion rather than perfectly flat frequency response, since **the latter doesn't exist** despite what speaker or amp is used.
Does this mean Macs are voltage paradigm amps? Doesn’t this conflict with the way autoformers function? Seems they would be power paradigm, especially given their multiple output taps. A little over my head here, but learning, so please forgive my ignorance!Mac amplifiers have always been voltage source amplifiers since the 1950s. It does not conflict with the use of an autoformer; such use is not the defining aspect. Most transformer coupled amps are voltage sources too. The taps are used to optimize the interface between the output devices and the speaker to minimize distortion. To make a power paradigm amp you have two pathways- either no feedback at all, or current feedback and voltage feedback of equal amounts. Since all forms of loop feedback are known to add higher ordered harmonic distortions as well as intermodulations, zero feedback is preferred, if adequate means are employed to otherwise suppress distortion in the amplifier. In this way the result can be considerably less colored, despite likely not having perfectly linear frequency response, due to the way the ear perceives distortion.
Put another way, the ear hears tiny amounts of higher ordered harmonics with striking ease. So if an amp has 0.001THD, but all the distortion it has is the 5th harmonic and above, it will sound bright and harsh. **That** is a coloration, and not a particularly pleasant one. This is why tubes vs transistors has been such an on-going debate and why tubes are still around.