Amp Upgrade for Aerial 10t's

Hi George,

Up til this last week I was running my 10t's with a pair of rogue M150's and a classe CA 301 on the bottom. This classe puts out gobs of amps, but is perhaps not the ultimate in control. These worked very well as the gains of the rogues are perhaps just slightly higher than that SS amp. I would image the M150's and Zeus would be a terrific match.

I would bet Holenneck's Krell would be very sweet on the mids and highs with another amp on the LF. It really is amazing how the additional power just opens the soundstage that much more. The depth goes on forever and air around the instruments is much better.

Mfishhead, I've had to go to stupidly priced speakers to unseat the 10t's. But I'm also going in a different direction, higher efficiency and lower power.

Best of luck,

Dan

Mike,

I've used Bryston 7bST monos with my 10T's for about three years. Great range and tight base. Good luck.

I used a Pass X350 for a couple of years (after moving up from an Aragon 8008ST). The improvement in the mids & highs was so stunning it sounded like a new, much better, speaker... smoother, angelic, sweet, airy, etc. Vocals were suberbly natural.
Curiously, the bass was a little too prominent until after a long break-in (3-400 hours), but then settled in nicely, especially after I switched to Cardas Golden Ref speaker cables (and interconnects) at the time.

The bass is said to be much more tuneful on the new X350.5, so I would give that a try if I still had 10Ts.

Soundstaging was about the same on the Pass, which is not the 10t's strong point (tonality and a non-fatiguing nature is where they excel, IMHO).

Good luck!

I don't know, Rgs92. Mine image very well, but it is room and placement dependant. Once I got them about 1/3 of the room length from the front wall bass and imaging really came into focus. I agree with you about cables improving their sound. The 10t's will show the differences, if they're truly there, in any upstream change you make in your system.

Dan_ed, you may be right, as I had them only 2.5 feet from the wall. There just didn't seem to be much depth to my ears, and images were a little smaller-than-life. But I nevertheless loved them for their natural, un-hi-fi sound. They are very forgiving of even the harshest recordings, but still provided a sense of real-life, there-in-the-room presence. They also did a great job of removing digital grunge.

I still recommend a Pass X-series amp, but one problem is the heat it generates.