Choosing the right Bryston amp

Put it this way....at high levels and with significant bass material the 3B will clip before getting the most out of your speakers. Clipping is the main cause of speaker failure: bass woofer sucks up too much of the amps power and then (most often) some nasty clipped signals heat up and burn out the tweeters. The sad part about this is that just before it blows it actually sounds less loud as the coils are by that time very hot (usually the third song played too loud)...in my view clean power especially with SS amps is worth it because it not only protects your speakers but reduces the awful clipping that you sometimes get from peaks in challenging material (unlike tubes, SS amps do not clip softly and sound plainly wrong when clipping)

A used 4BST should run 8-900$ more than a 3BST,[last I looked].Your call,depends a little on how long you may keep those speakers possibly....?Good luck,Bob

Buy the 4B SST, and buy it used if possible. It has substantially better resale than the 3B SST due to higher demand from buyers.

So it sounds like a matter of how loud do I want it.

But tell me this: does the 4B *sound* better than the 3B at normal volume? What would I be gaining other than power, if anything? I've been running the 3B, but I never tried to really crank it, as it seemed...unnecessary. OR maybe I was afraid of blowing something. I'm basically unaware of the limits of my stuff, and not inclined to find out the hard way. Anyway I've never noticed any clipping at what I would consider fairly high levels; maybe I'm not as deaf as some. My imagination suggests the potential for more bass rez, or more effortless highs, but...whatever.

I owned a 4B SST and I ran it with Von Schweikert VR4 Gen III HSE loudspeakers (89db/6 ohm). Even at it's rated 250wpc (or whatever it was...I forget), the 4B SST would clip and shut down when running at relatively high volumes (95db-98db).

Eventually, I bought a 14B SST. The low volume performance was improved due to the better bass in the 14B SST, and the amp never clipped or shut down.