speakers for classical music

"Lets all start praying."

To say it with the inimitable Zork. . . "if you pray long enough, your prayer will be answered!" . . . unless you get smitten by the Troll first that is.

In the meantime, we know that there is no one solution, between system dependencies, and audiofool dependencies. . . 'tis a jungle out there.

It would be pretty boring in this site if all high end stuff sounded the same.

At the risk of redundancy, let me suggest taking a look at the paper Atma-Sphere linked to:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

Briefly, different amplifier types behave differently when they see a non-resistive loudspeaker load. Most solid state amps approximate a constant-voltage source, and these are the ones who double their wattage output into 4 ohms and halve their output into 16 ohms. Many tube amps approximate a constant-power source, putting out roughly the same wattage into 4, 8 and 16 ohms.

So, let's assume our nominally 8-ohm speaker has a 32-ohm impedance peak in the crossover region. With a drive level that equals 1 watt output into 8 ohms, a solid state amp will put out 1/4 watt into that impedance peak, while a tube amp will put out four times as much power (1 watt) into that impedance peak. So the tonal balance will change significantly depending on amplifier type, and which type of amp works best depends on what the speaker designer had in mind.

Speakers whose impedance curves are very smooth (Maggies come to mind) work well with either type of amp, provided it is powerful enough.

The argument in favor of zero global feedback, soft-clipping, class A tube amps is a more complicated one, and probably doesn't belong in this thread.

Long story short: Amplifier to loudspeaker matching matters. If this is a subject that's important to you, check out that paper.

Duke

Thanks Duke.

That was said early on and the OP got way more than he bargained for. Anyway, plenty of viable options were proposed. Hopefully he'll let us know what he decides.

Dave

A few years ago I was looking into buying some Lamm amps. They had a paper like the Amasphere paper, describing the maths models they researched to get to their sound . At the time it was a wonderful sounding amp.

Many amplifiers and speakers later I am sure that if you have a good clean amp that can drive your speaker, you can EQ or alter the presentation to get most of the sound you want.

I have not noticed a decent amp completely change character due to a different speaker types (I dont mean flea power amps). There are many good around amps now.

The Halco DM series amps I had were a testament to what is possible from an amp. I had never heard anything like it up until then. An utter lack of noise or distortion made me realize the ills I had accepted from tubes. I have not had a tube amp since, much as I enjoyed the ones I have owned very much.