Tube amps with Apogee Scintilla's your thoughts ?

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.

Although VTLs have pretty good load handling, I would not recommend to continue using them. The best case scenario will be frequently blown B+ fuse, but the worst case can lead to fried PCB.

I have a pair of Innersound Kayas that also have 1ohm dips. I started out with 2EAR 890's in bridge mode, but they couldn't handle the Kayas. Extremely rolled off In the highs. Then I started with high power solid state, but quickly learned that I am a tube guy. I managed to purchase a tube amp that was originally designed to be sold as the Innersound itube. 150 watts, and 100 lbs. of transformers. It controls the electrostatic panels perfectly. Uses 8 KT 88's. There is a review of it on 6 moons. After Innersound folded, the designer, Terri Tekisham, continued to market it under the brand Western Reserve.
Other tube amps that work with stats are the Cat's,and the Berning OTL,s are incredible.