Tube-amp for Magnepan?

Atmasphere,

I completely disagree as do the majority of people who have ever dealt with Magnepan's, especially the larger models. I have owned, and tested Maggies and amp combos for years, and my excellent local dealer (who went out of business, sadly, last year) let me try many amps with their demo models, and not with any tube amp, including the big ARC's and VTL's did the Maggies wake up and sound good, when compared to high powered SS or Class D amps.

Maggie's absolutely DO need a lot of power to sound good. You can get them to make sound with almost anything, but it will not be what the speakers are capable of.

Sell your excellent amps, and try some Wyred4Sound amps and you will be shocked. Or, keep you amps, and get a pair of speakers better matched for them.

Either way, you will improve your listening experience.

Backing up Atmasphere on this one. Went from a Counterpoint Solid 2 (200 into 8, 400 into 4) to M60's with Zero's into 1.6 Maggies. Way tighter bass, no noise, no harshness and plenty of SPL for me (and my neighbors).

I heard the 1.6 at a local dealer, which were fed by some nice McIntosh amps. They sounded fine, nothing offended there. So it must be possible, at least. Of course price is a consideration there.

There is also the tube-SS hybrid option. You get tubes in the input stage and SS output stage. and lots of watts.

Van Alstine, Moscode, Alta Vista are some sample brands, roughly in ascending order wrt price.

I have tried Cary V12, Music Reference RM200, two Conrad Johnson Premier 11, and ARC VT100 to name a few during my maggie days. It works fine but bass is not its strong suit. Well, in maggie land, 50 hz is called "deep bass" anyway so it might work for you.

To me, there is no comparison using SS amps on maggies! I had good luck with Odyssey monos, Threshold S-500 x2, and even PWM amp like the ICE H2O. Also tried Levinson and sounds great, although I only had brief expereience with the ML's.

I guess you can try OTL and see how it sounds. The only downside, to me, is when it's time to replace tubes (there's plenty of them on it!). I always wonder how long the tubes will last on OTL amps driving planars or electrostatics.... not that I want to see for myself, just curious.

Magnaplanar is 30 minutes from our front door. Over the last 30 years we've had a lot of experience with them. In fact, our first prototypes were used immediately on Maggies as that was one of the speakers we were using for reference (Tympani 1Us -that was a long time ago...). Jim Winey has made a point of telling me a number of times that the best he ever heard one of their speakers (MG-20) was with our MA-2s.

I've seen people with our amps have the tubes last a long time. One guy here in town has had the same set for the last 8 years. If using M-60s, most everyone also uses a set of ZEROs. The amps then make 80 watts and run cooler, with greater authority and transparency, and the tubes last longer too.

Its true that if you put a powerhouse 600 watt amp on a speaker like this it will play a little louder, but you will find that at higher volumes the dynamics are compressed due to the phenomena I mentioned earlier. BTW this is not true of the push-pull speakers! I regard the 20.1 as one of the better bargains in high end audio, but this thread is with specific regard to the MG-2.