First of all a disclaimer: I am a Hyperion dealer.
IME the HPS-938 speakers have tremendous sinergy with McIntosh amplification. I am not a McIntosh dealer.
I have used HPS-938s successfully with a Mac Mc402 (solid state, 400W/channel, way too much spare power, great dynamics, sweet sound) and a Mc275 (tubed amp, about 90W/channel, the magic of tubes).
There is no brightness or lack of bass when paired with those amplifiers AND a first rate digital or analog source.
The HPS-938s also play outstanding music (though at lower max SPL levels) with Hyperion SET tubed amps.
I believe that most opinions about the 938 reflect poor choice in front end components. With the wrong CD player, one will hear lots of "digititis" through these very fast and clean speakers.
Most people allocate their budgets in equal shares split between source, amplifier and speakers. HPS-938s demand high-end (and higher-priced)source, cabling and amplifiers to really give their best, because their performance-to-price ratio is outstanding.
One common mistake is to assume that all digital sources are "bit perfect" and any 1k-2K SACD=DVA+CD player will be good enough for a high-end system. There is nothing further from my experience.
Good digital costs money and outstanding digital sources cost serious money, because digital reproduction of music is an always evolving technology. In a way, one could say that it is much more expensive to "squeeze" state of the art performance from a CD player than from an amplifier or speaker.
Amplifier circuit diagrams have beeen stable for the past 30 years. One pays for voicing, more power or fancy casework, but 99% of the amps out there (tube or solid state) have an input gain device, a phase splitter and a multiple of output devices fed by a linear power supply.
On the other hand, look up the diverse technical solutions and escalating prices for the usual digital references:
ARC CD-7 (tubed regulators +tubed output),
Wadia (phase-linear processing of the digital signal),
AMR (non-oversampling, choke input power supplies, tube output),
Meitner (DSD decoding),
Audio Aero (32 bit-192 KhZ upsampling, tube signal gain, Anagram computer to "smooth" out the digital sampling steps, dCs (ring DAC)
and Esoteric (proprietary transport + tight clocking).
Last time I checked, there were no 4-5 K$ CD players that would do justice to these speakers... all the mid-price players that I have auditioned suffer from digititis.
IMHO to achieve what these speakers are capable of delivering one needs a top-line CD player that focuses on musical gestalt (not HI-FI detail) e.g. ARC, Wadia, Audio Aero or Metronome, to name a few.
I am not saying that they are the best...my point is that they are so good that pairing them with a mid-price amp and source will not reveal their excellent musical qualities.
I hope this helps
