The advantage an OTL driving a set of ZEROs has is that the ZEROs don't limit bandwidth the way conventional transformers do. The ZEROs have impressive bandwidth - 2Hz to 2MHz, which is beyond most amps made. This is because they have a very low turns ratio, which of course requires that the amp portion of the equation be something fairly low. By low I mean a few ohms rather than hundreds or thousands of ohms.
That turns ratio makes a difference!
OTLs can be quite successful driving speakers other than ESLs. Perhaps because Magnaplanar is in town, we have a lot of locals that drive Maggies with our amps- and most of them use the M-60s! I've yet to run into a specific speaker technology that OTLS can't drive really well. What matters more is the impedance.
However the impedance thing has an interesting property- turns out that it really doesn't matter what kind of amp you have, if its being asked to drive a lower impedance its distortion will be higher. This is true of all amps (I added that because its worth repeating) and you can see it in their specs. The fact of the matter is if you are investing in any amplifier, your amplifier investment dollar will be best served by a higher impedance speaker is sound quality is your goal. If sound pressure is your goal than there is a weak (3 db) advantage to running a 4 ohm speaker as opposed to 8 ohms.
This is why the ZERO can help solid state amps in driving lower impedance loads even though they are already comfortable making the power to do so.
That turns ratio makes a difference!
OTLs can be quite successful driving speakers other than ESLs. Perhaps because Magnaplanar is in town, we have a lot of locals that drive Maggies with our amps- and most of them use the M-60s! I've yet to run into a specific speaker technology that OTLS can't drive really well. What matters more is the impedance.
However the impedance thing has an interesting property- turns out that it really doesn't matter what kind of amp you have, if its being asked to drive a lower impedance its distortion will be higher. This is true of all amps (I added that because its worth repeating) and you can see it in their specs. The fact of the matter is if you are investing in any amplifier, your amplifier investment dollar will be best served by a higher impedance speaker is sound quality is your goal. If sound pressure is your goal than there is a weak (3 db) advantage to running a 4 ohm speaker as opposed to 8 ohms.
This is why the ZERO can help solid state amps in driving lower impedance loads even though they are already comfortable making the power to do so.