atmasphere,
My room is L-shaped...front wall is 20’ wide, length is 26’, rear wall is 26’ wide, and 9’ ceiling. My room is rather "neutral", not too lively and not dark.
We should reject hard-to-drive speakers more often
Sorry I know this is a bit of a rant, but come on people!!
Too many audiophiles find speakers which are hard to drive and... stick with them!
We need to reject hard-to-drive speakers as being Hi-Fi. Too many of us want our speakers to be as demanding as we are with a glass of wine. "Oh, this speaker sounds great with any amplifier, but this one needs amps that weigh more than my car, so these speakers MUST sound better..."
Speakers which may be discerning of amplifier current delivery are not necessarily any good at all at playing actual music.
That is all.
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- 176 posts total
As @bdp24 noted, if you can drive the bottom 2-3 octaves with a separate amplifier, it provides many more options for the rest of the range. I have planar-magnetic dipole line arrays which are ~98db/w sensitivity, nominally 8 ohms with a minimum impedance of about 5 ohms. I'm driving these with a 300B SET amp and they sound glorious, but they only play down to about 170Hz. The woofers for the bottom few octaves are considerably less efficient and driven with their own 370W class A/B amp and provide plenty of output to below 20Hz. The combination can play full-range music louder than I want to listen in my 27' x 17' listening room. Obviously a bi-amped system is not for everyone, but by splitting out the bass, the rest of the range can be much more efficient without sacrificing sound quality. |
I have tried, relentlessly, for 30 years to find a high efficiency speaker I enjoy. It has been a total failure, I have tried hundreds if not thousands of pairs. Everything by Klipsch makes my ears bleed, Zu's excite my cats too much, Tannoys and most others are ridiculously expensive and leave me completely cold. When amplifiers with more than 30 watts were expensive it was worth the effort. I now use a 40 watt tube amp to drive Audio Physic speakers that are 89dB and 4 Ohms, the work effortlessly. |
With those speakers in a room of that size I would expect you'll need about 200-400 Watts. I don't know of an integrated amp that makes that much power.
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- 176 posts total