speakers for classical music

Thanks Duke.

That was said early on and the OP got way more than he bargained for. Anyway, plenty of viable options were proposed. Hopefully he'll let us know what he decides.

Dave

A few years ago I was looking into buying some Lamm amps. They had a paper like the Amasphere paper, describing the maths models they researched to get to their sound . At the time it was a wonderful sounding amp.

Many amplifiers and speakers later I am sure that if you have a good clean amp that can drive your speaker, you can EQ or alter the presentation to get most of the sound you want.

I have not noticed a decent amp completely change character due to a different speaker types (I dont mean flea power amps). There are many good around amps now.

The Halco DM series amps I had were a testament to what is possible from an amp. I had never heard anything like it up until then. An utter lack of noise or distortion made me realize the ills I had accepted from tubes. I have not had a tube amp since, much as I enjoyed the ones I have owned very much.

Have any on the Mahler owners listened in their own room to a CAR or Avantgarde Trio speaker...with full orchestra of course?

Can we get a direct comparison from someone?

hi,

Classical music has a large dynamic range ( 20 db or more) and the problem with some of the speakers listed is that they are inefficent and on the peaks of orchestral sound will send many amps into clipping. Tube amps have an advantage here with softer 2ed harmonic clipping characteriics

When listening at a average level of 85 db a 4 meteres with an inefficeint speaker, say 85 db/1watt/meter 8 watts is needed to reach 85 db at the listener psoition. To reach 105 db peaks will reaquir about 500 watts per channel. Now we are talking mega buck amps.

A simpler solution IMHO is to use more efficient speakers.

good listening

Larry

Larry510 said:

"Tube amps have an advantage here with softer 2ed harmonic clipping characteriics..."

I think it's a mistake to plan on clipping, even if it's mostly 2d harmonic. An amp that's clipping a your listening levels likely has very high distortion, particularly in the bass and highs. This should be avoided if you want accurate musical presentation.

Dave