Bombaywalla,
How do you think my ARC Ref 150 SE tube amp would fare with the Ultima Salons?
My amp has 4, 8 and 16 ohm output taps. I surmise that the 4 ohm taps would work best with the Salons given its lowish impedance in the low frequencies. I seem to recall that the output impedance off the 4 ohm taps is about a half an ohm. Rated power off the 4 ohm tap is well north of 150 watts if driving a 4 ohm load.
Reason for question: I’ve had Salons on my radar screen for a while.
Bifwynne,
good to see you are still lurking around these forums - haven’t heard much from you since you installed DEQX in your system.... :-)
well, we have discussed your ARC 150W/ch amp many times in these forums. I remember that it has a pretty stiff power supply (I seem to remember 1000+ Joules) & being a tube amp it’s going to maintain its output wattage more or less.
What does "Rated power off the 4 ohm tap is well north of 150 watts if driving a 4 ohm load" mean? Is it 200W/ch into 4 Ohms?
I believe it will be much better than the XA30.5 driving the Salons as you will have atleast 2X the output wattage.....
.....but, man, I think you’ll need an even bigger amp to make the Salons sing. I’m thinking atleast 300W/ch (which is going to get expensive!).
You’ll get average sonics from your 150W/ch & like xti16 wrote it depends on how hard you want to drive the Salons. If you settle for less & drive it to lower average SPLs then you should be good but it you want more realistic listening levels, i think you’ll find that you will want a bigger amp.
I once had a speaker that could handle 105dB SPL peaks & it was really very good sonically but on rock & blues there were times I wished it could hit higher peaks.
You might be different - you might be happy with lower peak SPL???
I’ve a friend who has the original Salon speakers & drives it with a Gamut 200W/ch s.s. mono-block amp to a really, really, really good effect. He has a smaller room & they way that speaker pressurizes that room in the bass region is simply a treat. I’ve never heard anything like that in a long time....
Now the s.s. amps of that caliber are different - their output power jumps atleast 50% into lower impedances so I bet that he has something like 300W/ch or slightly more into 4 Ohms (which is where i was going with this in the sentences above).
Hope this helps. FWIW.