Tube-amp for Magnepan?

I forgot to add that i run a 2-sub system with a sold state 200w amp for bass. My Maggies always needed some help in the low end and this realy works fine.

How far is Bryston from Bear Lake? Seems like Magnepan feels proximity is not as important to them as the amps that match the best.

I have heard the IIIa's many time with high powered SS amps, and they act very much like my 3.6r's do, they open up and sing, and the bass goes much lower.

I know you sell tube gear, but I disagree with your plug for your gear.

Macdadtexas, the thread here is about tube amps, and that's **White** Bear Lake. I mentioned that they are close simply because they have a lot of customers locally and there has been plenty of opportunity to hear them with our gear- we may well have more Magnaplanar customers with our gear here than anywhere else...

In fact is that Magnapans have never been our first choice due to impedance. Nevertheless we find a lot of Magnapan users that want to run OTLs and vice versa. Maybe they want to combine the transparency of the speaker with that of the amps. The guy that founded the Magnaplanar Users Group over on AudioAsylum.com (a customer of ours) says that our MA-1 was the ideal amplifier for the 3.6.

Another amplifier that has been used with Magnaplanar a lot over the years is ARC. They too are local. Just because Magnaplanar uses a particular amplifier at a show is not an endorsement that they think that that particular amp is the 'best'- but I would expect that it **is** an endorsement that the amp works well with their product.

Thanks for all the interesting input.I have an other q:
Does anybody have any experience with Sonic Frontiers Power II and Maggies...they are often seen in the secondhand marked and offer 110w? I live in Norway and the extra heat is really welcomed these days...
Thanks,Erik

My experience with magnepans of various sizes is that tube amps can sound great on them. I had the ARC VT150se monos on 3.6rs and it was sublime.
The problem is you never reach the limit of the speaker with tubes.

I had Audio valve monos too but the speaker always sounded sluggish and did not express the feeling of music being alive as the ARCs did.

However when I tried SS amps I found the speaker became much tighter and was capable of higher SPLs and clearer dynamics. I had Plinus SS amps which seemed voiced very closely to the ARC tubes, but with more control in the bass. Unfortunately they lost a bit of soul in comparison to ARC.

The most impressive sound I ever heard from my maggies was with the Halcro DM38. I didnt know my maggie could make that kind of sound! For a lot less money and 97% of the sound try Belcantos old evo gen2s, or the newer ice power models. The ref1000s will be great on them.

I know you are looking for tube amps, but see what the speakers are capable of before dumbing them down. If you just want romance at low to medium levels a tube amp will be fine and will be a fine listen.

I think the bottom line is Maggies will work fine with various tube amps of around 100w and over, but at the expense of dynamic swings which is a weakness of plannars anyway. Plus you will never get high volume levels with out the sound of the diaphram hitting magnets. They need to be controlled to squeeze that last bit of life out of them.