ICE Amps for classical music?

"Note : (Bass) Improved over previous BC500 sound , not perfect .."

Have you ever had "perfect" bass in the listening room for reference?

This brings two things to mind.

1) bass is highly sensitive to speaker placement in room and room acoustics even with the best equipement

2) I had to adjust my speaker location somewhat when I switched in the BC amps. I find that switching amps in general typically involves at least some minor tweaking of speaker location within the room to retain best results.

I bought my BCs used and was not sure about break-in amount prior. At first, the sound was stark and bare sounding in comparison to my prior amp, a Musical Fidelity A3CR (Stereophile Class A FWIW). After a while, things settled in to a new and better reality. Part of this was my ears adjusting to the new sound, which was much tighter and cleaner and dynamic top to bottom still with very good detail. I attribute the different sound of the BCs somewhat to high damping factor (>1000 I believe is the spec). High damping is generally considered a desirable thing for my OHM speakers with the Walsh drivers. High Damping may not be the case with planars like Maggies.

I say that based partially on technical intuition but also on the fact that when I owned Maggies they worked well with a 360 w/ch carver m4.0t amp (low damping and current) whereas I had to dump the Carver to get balanced sound out of the newer OHMs.

One more note that believe the thing about the BCs that made me adjust speaker location was the deeper and consequently larger soundstage that the BC produced. The speakers needed additional room to breath and do imaging freely as a result.

It strikes me that in a tight room or in a case where the big soundstage the BCs are capable of delivering is constrained, that muddy bass and a general blurring of sound overall could be possible. The solution would be to work with speaker placement and in some cases perhaps additional room treatments, etc.

I may know what happened with the Weseixas shoot-out. This is far-fetched, but maybe he just did not like the Bel Canto amplifier? It seems at least plausible.

"This is far-fetched, but maybe he just did not like the Bel Canto amplifier?"

Of course that is always possible.

But, to achieve best results, first it would be beneficial to make sure things are set up well to enable a comparison of what each piece is capable of, rather than what each piece just happened to deliver.

I know what the Bel canto ref100mkii is capable of with proper setup because I have been through setting it up. I also believe that without the proper setup, teh results could be quite unimpressive.

Exceptional things usually require some special preparation in order to receive the benefit. That is definitely the case with the BC amps based on my experience.

I've never heard the Threshold, which I am certain is a fine and surely different sounding amp as well, so I cannot offer anything there.

Hello Gents ,

Mapman are you suggesting the sound stage on the BC is so wide and vast , it made the bass less define and less extended vs the Threshold, because it needs more room.

What if the threshold sounds better in a smaller room , should we have moved the speakers to a smaller room to compare the sound... LOL

Guys,

I'm not saying the threshold is better than the BC, I'm saying in this setup were the BC500 lives, it did a better job.

The BC500 had a bigger sound and had more information in the upper registers , but it did so at the expense of sounding hard and unmusical by comparison, even the tonal balance was off , noted especially on Pianos.

This was the unanimous decision of all in the room ncluding the owner of the BC.

Again the Maggies are very revealing in the upper registers and on a different type speaker the results could have been different. I would suspect limited bandwidth speakers to sound better on the BC for sure .

I'm having an S500 modified and updated, maybe I will drop it off at Muralman's when in NC and have him write the next A/B review and take the heat on this ...LOL -)