Tube amps with Apogee Scintilla's your thoughts ?

Stanwal,
It is my understanding that Magnepan successfully sued Apogee because of patent violations of Magnepan's ribbon technology. Apogee could not survive after this and I believe Magnepan got the right to use Apogee technology which they never have. I'm aware of the new company that is/are going to try to produce Apogees again. I would also assume they are aware of Magnepan's probable interest. You are correct in that the two speakers don't look similar at all. I don't know if the patent has run out. I would assume Magnepan would renew their patent. Magnepan's ribbon is a remarkable sounding work of art. I'm a big fan.

There is talk on this link about the bass part being a magnetic planar like Magnepan.[http://www.audioenz.co.nz/forums/printthread.php?t=276&pp=15]

About 20 years ago one of the first reviews ever written on our amps was in TAS. Most of it was written by Steven Stone, who had a set of Apogee Full Range speakers, which were 1 ohm.

At the time we had a product called the Z-Music, which was an autoformer that loaded the amp at about 11 ohms, and provided taps for 4,3,2 and 1 ohms. We set up the MA-1s, which at the time were 100 watts (the later ones are 140) and make no mistake, we are talking about an OTL.

Using the autoformer, the amps and speakers sounded great together, and was the first time Steve heard what the speakers could do with tubes. He made a point of mentioning this in his review. Other than the impedance, they were not hard to drive (they are a fairly resistive load if I recall)- the amps made plenty of power on them, enough that to run them out of gas had the system playing painfully loud. They played bass just fine, the mids were smooth and sweet, also well defined- a really impressive speaker!

We stopped making the Z-Music about 15 years ago, but there is the ZERO (http://www.zeroimpedance.com) that can do a similar job.

We got a Golden Ear Award about 12-13 years ago using a set of our MA-1s on Duettas- without ZEROs or anything; my impression is that Apogees are not that hard to drive and its worth it to try to make tubes do it.

I generally prefer the innate quality of tube amplifiers rather than SS amps. I guess it does`nt hurt to try, but it seems a very high current SS amp would be preferable with the demanding Scintilla.

I think tube amplifiers have been underestimated here by the solid state crowd among us. I have driven many so called amplifier killers with moderately powered tube amplifiers with sound quality that could not be achieved with solid state.