Tube-amp for Magnepan?

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.

I owned the MG3.6's and powered them with Parasound JC1 mono's (400w/ch). I always took it as fact based on comments like those from Macdadtexas that the maggies needed big muscular SS power amps to sound their best.

Those assumptions vanished when I put a pair of Atma-Sphere MA-1's on the maggies while I waited for my new speakers to be finished and shipped. I bought the MA1's to power the new speakers. The 140w/ch MA1's were extraordinary with the MG3.6's!!! If I hadn't already put 1/2 down on the new speakers, I may have cancelled that order.

It should be understood that I assumed they would sound ok at lower volume levels, but probably a little "closed in". This is something I noticed with smaller SS designs with the MG3.6's so I assumed it would be similar. I wasn't even going to try to play them at normal listening levels, but after hearing how spectacular they sounded at low levels, I continued to inch the volume up until they were sounding extraordinary at fairly loud levels.

I called my friend immediately (he owned the MG3.6's too and powered them with a McCormack DNA-2 Limited with all the SMC upgrades). He was very familiar with the sound of my system with the JC1's. One minute into a familiar song played at our normal (fairly loud) listening level, his jawed dropped and he said, "I had no idea the Maggies could sound like this!". When I had told him earlier in the day that I was thinking about hooking up the MA1's just see what it sounded like, he thought it was a waste of time. He too had made incorrect assumptions regarding the Maggies and the Atma-Sphere OTL's for that matter.

I wouldn't attempt to play the maggies at ear-splitting levels with the MA1's, but if you listen to jazz, blues, classic rock, or classical at reasonably loud levels, they will make music better than any SS amp in my opinion based on how the JC1's and McCormack compared, or rather didn't compare.

I never attempted to try the Zero's. More potential may be possible with those. But please, everyone, at least with the Maggies, challenge those "truisms". Great music awaits you if you do.

I would disagree with Chadeffect regarding dynamic swings, at least with regard to Atma-Sphere OTL tube amps on the maggies. Dynamic swings, particularly micro-dynamic swings (the most important for me) were outstanding with the MA1's.

A good tube amp won't "dumb down" the maggies.