Eminent Technology LFT-8b in Harry's system

I really don't want to rain on anyone's parade but like every speaker I have tried, the LFT-8B have a few flaws and they can be quite intrusive.  I had them paired to my Belles 150a amp.  The bass from the woofer was never quite right in my room.  Way to under-damped and boomy.  The other issue was the panel itself.  They are supposed to be crossed over at 180 Hz but I wished that wasn't the case because at moderate volume, with bass heavy stuff (think Patricia Barber), the panel would distort, panel slap is what I have heard it called.  So, they are nice, very nice for classical but not up to the reference quality some people here claim.  I liked my Martin Logans I got after that a little more.
  

What? The LFT-8b’s aren’t perfect?! I like my Quads (original 57's) and Magneplanar Tympani-IV's more than the LFT's in some ways, but that's not the point of the post.

As I understand it, Roger Modjeski was definitely "around" Harold Beveridge, and if anything he may have had a hand in the design of the amplifiers or maybe just building them.  But Beveridge was the guiding genius behind the whole ensemble, and I do think his work merits the appellation, "genius".  Like the work of many other geniuses, his work had a few minor flaws, like a weak bass amplifier and under-specified woofers, for the 2SW model that I own.  His first loves were the models 1 and 2.  There apparently very few Model 1s ever made, and less than 200 pairs of Model 2s and 2SWs.  The 1s and 2s were full-range.  The 2SW goes down to 100 Hz, and below that you have to supply the woofer.  I use a pair of KEF B139 woofers in transmission lines that I built myself 40 years ago, externally powered by a Threshold 50W class A amp.  There were Models 3 and up, also, but all those speakers are conventional ESLs that require external amplification.

First of all, what a coinkidink!  Back in around 1970, I was being paid very little as an intern in a hospital, and I craved a pair of IMF Monitor loudspeakers.  As a financial compromise, I bought a pair of IMF Studios, instead (from Lyric Hi-Fi in Manhattan).  The Monitor used a KEF B139 in a Bailey-type TL, a KEF B110 midrange, and a KEF tweeter.  Not entirely satisfied with the Studios, I eventually decided to try to build my own pair of Monitors from scratch.  I had a patient who agreed to let me use his table saw, and I acquired two 4X8 sheets of HDF, about 1.2 inches thick, and lots of clamps, glue, screws, etc. I bought the B139s and B110s easily enough, and then I found a guy in California willing to sell me RTR ESL tweeters (the blue rectangular ones), as many as I wanted, with a power supply to drive them.  I bought eight, with the intention of using four per speaker.  Thus I built a TL speaker with the B139s and B110s in entirely separate TLs. (The woofer cabinet is nearly a carbon copy of the Bailey design, a la the IMF Monitor.)  And the four RTR ESL tweeters were arranged in a linear array along one side of the woofer enclosure.  A few months later, I met an EE who helped me design the crossover and in fact wound me some inductors.  This was a darn good speaker that blew the pants off a pair of Magneplanar Tympani 1Us, when they came on the market.  I moved from this speaker to full range ESLs shortly thereafter ( 2 pairs of KLH 9s), and I sold the home-made speakers to my cousin, who used them for at least 20 years.  When he finally wanted to be rid of them, I bought them back, cut off the parts of the cabinets that supported the B110s and the tweeters, and stored the TL woofer cabinets in my basement for another 20 years.  Then I bought the Bev 2SWs and finally saw a use for the B139s in the TL. (I had kept a pair of NOS B139s, all that time.) I still use one of those B110s as a test load when I work on my amplifiers.  The B139 won't take much amplifier power, but I think that in a TL, it is one of the lowest distortion woofers ever made.

A tube amplifier with no output transformer is called an OTL.  OTLs can drive any speaker, other than an ESL, with a high enough input impedance.  What the Beveridge, the Modjeski, and other ESL "direct-drive" amplifiers do in addition is to drive an ESL with no step-up transformer at the ESL end of the chain.  So, no transformer in the signal path, at all. To do this, direct-drive amplifiers have to develop thousands of DC volts at their outputs; the audio signal rides on the high DC voltage, which simultaneously biases the ESL.  (The Bev speakers are a special case of an ESL where the diaphragm is low impedance; classic ESLs have a very high impedance on their diaphragms.) DD amps are OTL, but not all OTL amps can DD, is my point.