Tekton Double Impacts

Mac,
If you and I can ever coordinate our schedules I’d bring my Frankenstein (with its 8 and 16 ohm taps) and we can simply listen to how they interact with your DIs from their 8 ohm tap. I’ll be back in Michigan in a few days.

Cal,
The Frankenstein works wonderfully with the Coincident Eclipse line of speakers and their Triumph Extreme monitor speakers. It seems that the other Coincident speakers need the Coincident Dragon mono blocks or suitable amplifier with more than 8 watts. I truly believe that the Line Magnetic 845 or 805 tubed SET amplifiers would be excellent with your Coincident PRE speakers.

If Mac and I are able to get together I’ll surely report to you how the Frankenstein and Double Impacts fared as a pairing. Grannyring (Bill) you’re right, this is all about subjective preferences. I do believe Terry in that the Double Impact and Triode Labs sound better than "any" other amp/speakers match he has heard in his review/main system and this includes many fine audio products over the years. 
Charles

Hi Charlies,

Please remember that I just ran the experiment of driving the Triode Lab SET 2A3 amplifier with a very good tube based preamplifier through the Ulf's and this combo was very good, but did not have the ultimate magic of the combo of the Micro-ZOTL/2A3.  Yes, for me the 2A3 tube is even more natural/musical then my old favorite 300B.  However, the Micro-ZOTL adds the overall kick/dynamics, pure tonality and 3D imaging and the 2A3 adds the colors and even more air and space between players.  One more time, on either the DI's or Ulf's, regardless of the type of music, I can shake the walls and pressurize my very large acoustic with ease.

Just submitted my order for a pair of Electrons this afternoon.   Cautiously hopefull.  Would have loved a pair of double impacts, but their visual/size dominance is just too much for my room.  Praying the Electron will approach the level of play reported here.  

Dan in dc

Mac, regarding your question I’ll just second the good answers provided by Bill (Grannyring) and Kenny.

Regarding 2.83 volts vs. 1 watt, power into a resistive load equals volts squared divided by ohms. So 2.83 volts into 8 ohms is 1 watt, but 2.83 volts into 4 ohms is 2 watts. And since a power ratio of 2:1 corresponds to a 3 db difference, if the SPL of a 4 ohm speaker is specified on the basis of 2.83 volts (as is the case more often than not), 3 db has to be subtracted from that number to get SPL on a per watt basis.

The rationale for specifying on the basis of 2.83 volts is presumably that most solid state amps can supply considerably more power into 4 ohms than into 8 ohms, in some cases twice as much (i.e., 3 db more). However most tube amps cannot do that, even if they provide a 4 ohm tap.

Cal, I’ll mention another issue concerning passive biamping, which applies even in the more typical case of a speaker having a much higher crossover point between bass and mid/hi than 110 Hz, and which electrically filters low frequencies out of the signal provided to the mid-range drivers (which the PRE does not). If the amp powering the bass driver is much more powerful than the amp powering the mid/hi drivers, chances are that a good deal of the power capability of the bass amp won’t be able to be utilized. While a passive biamp arrangement reduces the amount of current and power that has to be supplied by the amps, both amps still have to output a voltage corresponding to the full frequency range of the signal. So turning up the volume control high enough to utilize most of the power capability of the higher powered amp would most likely drive a significantly lower powered amp into clipping, resulting in severe distortion.

That fact seems to often be overlooked, when people consider passively biamping a high powered amp (often a solid state amp) in conjunction with a relatively low powered amp (often a tube amp). Active biamping, with an electronic crossover "ahead" of the amps, avoids that problem, but potentially has sonic issues of its own.

Best regards,
-- Al

I'm just hoping the Pioneer M-22 that I have coming is powerful enough with 30 watts, all Class A, at 4 ohms.

I have some friends that say the M-22 amp is magic if you have enough power to get the headroom you need for the music you listen to.