snell a II

Question: How would the Snell A/II speakers sound with a McIntosh MC-275 amp? Would this not be enough power? If not, what high quality tube amp could I get away with at a price that is not say higher than $5000?

the mac 275 amp might work in a small room. i use to drive my snells type A2 w/ a single ARC D 79B w/c has the same power rating as the mac 275. but when you play orchestral spectaculars you will see the short comings w/c is lack of power.its for this reason i acquired one more ARC D79B and the ARC EC 21 electronic tube crossover.i also purchased both ARC D250 mk2 servo and ARC classic 150 mono blocks and they worked very well W /the snells A2.these units are all high quality tube units. for your budjet i would suggest the ARC D250 mark 2 servo ,ARC classic 150, ARC vt 200, theyre all less than $ 5000.i hope this would answer your querries

I have a pair of Type A IIs that I've had for, let's see, 15 years or so. The Type A has always been one of my favorites, even before I owned a pair, and so years ago when I found a used pair in good physical shape for cheap I jumped at the chance to buy them.

Fortunately, I'm local to the Snell factory so I took them there to be worked on when I needed to replace the tweeters (they were a little wonky when I bought the speakers) and to fix the veneer around the bottom of the woofer cabinet. There was (and probably is still) a guy there named Mark who has been at Snell for years and still knows the Type A inside and out. Later, when I needed to have the woofers re-surrounded, I took them back to Mark as well.

I decided a couple years ago to re-do the crossovers with audiophile-grade caps and such, as a couple other posters have reported doing. I bought the parts, but we moved shortly after that and our new house doesn't really have a room that's the right size and shape to fit the Type As in (they are big). So, they are in storage right now. Yuck. I'm trying to figure out how to make a listening room somewhere...

I agree with the comments that the Type As are power hungry. I have used various amps with them but my modest pair of MC-modded Hafler DH200s running in bi-amp with the Snell active crossover seems to work best for me.

Over the years I've gotten to know people at Snell and they are serious about their product. It's unfortunate that they seem to be getting pigeon-holed into home theatre applications these days but I guess as a company you need to go where the money is to some degree. Nonetheless, I'm starting to think about what my next pair of speakers might be and I'm going to audition Snell C7s sometime in the next month or so.

Vernon Miller
Contoocook, NH

Vernon,

Another Type A fan, good to see. Mark @ Snell is still there...I talked to him last week.

I have a pair of A-I's & just yesterday picked up a pair of A-III's. You think the AII are big...I can't get over the size of the AIII's...man! I need to do the foams on the woofers of the AIII's & will probably do the caps too. What caps did you settle on?

Also...if you haven't, you may want to look over the discussion on the Type A's at http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Board/

Hey Fishboat:

I'd like to get a pair of A-IIIs myself. I don't know where I'd put them either - so then I'd have TWO pair that I can't deploy! :-)

I mostly ended up with Solen caps. A couple of the values I needed weren't available in Solen so I used another brand but I can't remember which one. I'll look and let you know. I did not change the inductors, I used the originals.

I'm thinking seriously of one other mod; moving the crossover outside. That is, the cabinet will just contain the drivers and the crossover will be in an external box. This would be just to make it easier to tweak it.