speakers for classical music

I cant help myself so here I go...

This old argument about tubes or SS does drive me mad.

I have heard a few great sounding tube amps (ARC, Lamm, Audio note), but they always have sonic problems. Some almost worth putting up with, but still ultimately annoying. SS amps too. Then finding the right speakers to match etc.

I heard some Atmaspheres which sounded very good by the way.

Cant we have an amp technology that just works? Its like buying a car that goes great around corners, but just wont go in a straight line unless the road is made of a special concrete and not tar!

If you like a characteristic, say a type of tube, lets just put that software in. But the amp its self having no "sound" but will drive any type of speaker with no distortion or noise unless asked to. Oh small, cheap and efficient too!

Lets all start praying.

Chadeffect asked:

"Cant we have an amp technology that just works? "

We can, that's why I bought Rowland, not because it's tube or SS, but because it works in my system.

Dave

"Lets all start praying."

To say it with the inimitable Zork. . . "if you pray long enough, your prayer will be answered!" . . . unless you get smitten by the Troll first that is.

In the meantime, we know that there is no one solution, between system dependencies, and audiofool dependencies. . . 'tis a jungle out there.

It would be pretty boring in this site if all high end stuff sounded the same.

At the risk of redundancy, let me suggest taking a look at the paper Atma-Sphere linked to:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

Briefly, different amplifier types behave differently when they see a non-resistive loudspeaker load. Most solid state amps approximate a constant-voltage source, and these are the ones who double their wattage output into 4 ohms and halve their output into 16 ohms. Many tube amps approximate a constant-power source, putting out roughly the same wattage into 4, 8 and 16 ohms.

So, let's assume our nominally 8-ohm speaker has a 32-ohm impedance peak in the crossover region. With a drive level that equals 1 watt output into 8 ohms, a solid state amp will put out 1/4 watt into that impedance peak, while a tube amp will put out four times as much power (1 watt) into that impedance peak. So the tonal balance will change significantly depending on amplifier type, and which type of amp works best depends on what the speaker designer had in mind.

Speakers whose impedance curves are very smooth (Maggies come to mind) work well with either type of amp, provided it is powerful enough.

The argument in favor of zero global feedback, soft-clipping, class A tube amps is a more complicated one, and probably doesn't belong in this thread.

Long story short: Amplifier to loudspeaker matching matters. If this is a subject that's important to you, check out that paper.

Duke