You said it yourself "many moons ago"...let’s say customer A has a nice used pair of Beta’s, a fully refurbed Threshold S/500 Series II (of which you’re very familiar) and a 2nd hand ARC Reference 110 with new NOS tubes, where are you going to put the tube amp?Wouldn’t change anything, if fact back then our hearing was far more acute, still remain the same, as that downward sliding impedance curve
3ohm@150hz
2.5ohm@700hz
1.5ohm @3khz
1ohm@20khz
This would still knock the HF out of the tube amps, on the Threshold s/500 things will remain flat out to 20khz.
And the Ref110 should cope still with the bass tower impedance, it doesn’t go below 5ohms on the Stereophile graph.
Cheers George