speakers for classical music

Not quite, High efficiency speakers may also be driven by low power SS amps to good advantage. Case in point, Avantgarde has designed and offers the Model 3 SS 30W class A/B push pull device with feedback loop, optimized for its speakers, even equipped with XLR connectors. My friend Frontier1 is currently using it and prefers it for Avantgarde Duos over every tube amp he has tried on Avantgarde Duos. I suspect that also some of the lower power SS Pass XA.5 amps may work well with the Avantgarde speakers.

Also, the old saw that high powered SS amps don't have a good "first watt" is no longer true in all cases. Jeff Rowland contends that you could never ignore the first watt and that you always needed linearity in all operating conditions. Yes, there'd be tons of unused power if you hooked up a 500 watt Rowland Continuum to a speaker requiring flea-watts, but it'd sound good.

Dave

Hi Dave, my only concern would be a very steep volume up/down. If a pre were to increase volume only by small fractions of a Db per step, even a muscular amp may work on some high efficiency speakers. . . actually Capri pre comes to mind, doesn't it have 0.1Db steps when turning the volume knob slowly? AN what about your Continuum 500?

G.

Again I agree with dave here. I have tried the Avantgarde Unos with some pretty powerful SS amps including a Halcro DM38. Most impressive.

If you spoke to Avantgarde themselves you will find they wont recommend tubes, in fact they make their own SS amp. Orpheus amps work very well too.

The Continuum is .5dB per attenuator step (I think that the Capri is also), but it takes a setting over 30 to start rising above the abient noise with my speakers rated in the 90-93dB sensitivity range.

I generally listen from a setting as low as 50 (reading by myself, sitting close to the speaker with low ambiant noise) and as high as 79.5 or even just over 80 (trying to knock myself out of the listening position with MTT's excellent Mahler 6th). With a super efficient speaker I suspect that I'd listen around 20 and my upper range might be 29 (BTW, those are step setting readings, not dB). I still think that the loudness refinement would be granular enough, but you'd definitely want to try.

Surely, no one owning horns is going to go buy a Continuum 500, but if you already had one laying around, then it might actually work pretty well.

Dave