Infinity Renaissance 90 questions

Hi Timpani, I completely agree with your comments on the quality of upstream components (particularly amps) & the need to feed the Watkins high current, that's why I like the Classe so much, it gives you enough watts in a single pa, but a truckload of current to boot. For me, the Classe combined with a Reference 3 pre-amp is a match made in Heaven for the Rens :)

Okeeteekid, it was great to read your comments on your K9s! What is exciting about your findings is that, taking me as an example, I purchased a superb example of Ren 90's with a long-term view. I would be happy for them to be my speakers for life, but of course at some point in the future age will catch up with them. The Watkins and midrange drivers will require re-foaming, the internal caps will degrade & the wiring will oxidize, so it's encouraging to see how much more potential there obviously is there. In my case, I plan to do quite an extreme, external crossover connected with something like Nordost Supreme Reference for the short run to the speakers, but will leave the drivers alone. The guru I would get to do the speaker re-design is a guy in Australia who Timpani would have heard of - Dallas Clarke. To say he knows his stuff is an understatement! My only question is, would there be more value in spending $4000AU on a RS filter & pc or investing something like $3000 on the speaker re-design, re-wire & external crossover & just plug my high end pc's directly into a kmart powerboard connected to the wall? Would like to hear your view on that..

Melbguy, My comments need to be taken in correct context and with allowance for the fact that I have recently been playing with tweeters that have a 120 degree beamwidth at 20kHz. The EMIT's are probably as good as many or even most dome tweeters in terms of dispersion and everything you point out about their develoment is correct but I am pretty sure that they were refined further for the Epsilon and the dispersion was the major criteria. I recall reading this in the Sterephile review about 10 years ago now (how time flies). By adjusting the amount of toe-in you will certainly be able to fine tune them nicely but just don't expect a really huge sweet spot. But as I have said before the EMIT's are fine tweeters and by far and away the best planar tweeter I have ever heard. I have also heard several of the Kappa series and IMO the Rens are more accurate and detailed and because the EMIM and EMIT are of exactly the same design they are able to acheive that rare feat of almost perfect integration from mid to treble which IMO is by far the most important crossover point in any speaker system. In most respects the Infinity multi planar driver approach is better than most of the full range planar designs due to the mentioned beamwidth > frequency issues and also because planar drivers make it possible to implement the near perfect passive crossover - due to their flat and wide resistive impedance. In other words it's almost as though there is no crossover and that's why (when set up correctly) the Ren's + IRS Infinity's sound quite a bit like an electrostatic speaker.
I can understand that the next 2 weeks will be a long time
but all the very best for eternity after that. After all, 'Infinity' is forever.

i feel the speaker is the last of your components in a system that is heard and the most critical component in your system, you can run a kmart speaker on the worlds best electronics and it will sound ok but if you run the worlds best speaker on "kmart" electronics i feel it will always sound better than the after mentioned.
greg

i feel the speaker is the last of your components in a system that is heard and the most critical component in your system, you can run a kmart speaker on the worlds best electronics and it will sound ok but if you run the worlds best speaker on "kmart" electronics i feel it will always sound better than the after mentioned.
greg

Sorry I don't agree, and especially in the case of the R.90 a weak electronic will show you 10% of these speakers. I gave my Fet nine + OCM 200 (from David Belles) to a friend who has a couple of 20 years very modest & old Canton bookschelves speakers, you should hear how they are sounding now! ... we were very surprised.
It's like with cars do you prefer to have a Ferrari with an engine of Mini or a Mini with an engine of Ferrari?
My choice is done ;-)

It's an age old discussion point. The safe statement is to say that any system is only as good as the weakest link. However, as a part time amplifier designer I can say that there is infinitely more scope for design variations with amps than there is with speakers, which is the opposite to what most people might expect. It's also a fair point to state the amplifier > speaker interface and the complex load presented by the speaker can and does induce distortions in every amplifier - but very differently depending on the ampifier design. This can be a huge source of confusion for audiophiles who spend a great deal of time changing their power amplifiers for the best possible result only to find after an upgrade of speakers that the amp sounds mediocre when compared with one they had previously discarded. Of course these statements are most true of low to mid priced amps but they can also sometimes apply to very expensive designs. I regard Krell highly because in my experience they produce close to the the same sound regardless of the speaker load presented. When you hear differences between speakers you can be far more certain that they are indeed differences between speakers. Not too long ago I was visiting someone who loved AR preamps. He was demo'ing differences between interconnect cables to the power amp and he believed that his AR must be better than his Krell because it was showing up big differences while the Krell did not. Of course the reality was that the different cables had very different amounts of capacitance which was exposed by the relatively high output impedance of the tube preamp. Unfortunately I was not able to convince him that this was the case. That's not to say that I don't believe that cables can make a difference but from my experince as an amp designer I have found that a small change to an amplifier gain stage - even a small change to a resistor value can result in a far bigger change than you can get by changing cables.