I concur with you- marqmike
Happy Listening!
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Excellent points/counterpoints -beetlemania
I concur about the upstream components being easier to detect by listeners. Happy Listening!
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beetlemania
are you playing the Ayre as loud as you wish? Does the AX-5 measure into 2 ohms?
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@jafant The Ayre has plenty of balls for my room (18 x 19 x 8-12) and listening tastes. The "VGT" volume control has 46 1.5 dB steps and I usually listen at a 20-24 when I have the house to myself, maybe 26-28 if I want some rowdy rock. The highest I've pushed with the Thiels is 30-32. No apparent distortion but this level becomes uncomfortably loud. With the Vandys, I had to add about 4 steps to attain similar SPLs (as an aside, I could get my old AX-7 to clip with the Vandys but, again, that was at SPLs too loud for me). Ayre does not give the AX-5 a 2 Ohm rating. Here's what JA said in his measurements:
That the AX-5 was not as comfortable driving 2
ohms as it was higher impedances can be seen in fig.6. This plots the
THD+N percentage against frequency at a level, 8.9V, equivalent to 10W
into 8 ohms, where I could be sure I was looking at actual distortion
rather than noise. Into 8 ohms (blue and red traces) and 4 ohms (cyan
and magenta), the THD+N is very low and hardly changes with frequency,
which again is a tribute to the zero-loop-feedback topology. But into 2
ohms (green), not only is the THD higher, but the level was a little
unstable at the lower frequencies.
Apparently, power is slightly higher with the Twenty version but I have no idea how that might change JA's THD+N measurements. Again, I would be reluctant to drive CS5s (impedance drops to 2 Ohms in the bass) with an AX-5 but I hear no deficiency with the CS2.4SE. |
Thanks! much- beetlemania
maybe I can find an AX-5 near my locale for an audition?
Happy Listening!
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