So what your saying is an amp that can drive the Wilson Alexia’s known impedance of down to 0.9ohm is a bad amp?????I hope I didn't imply that. An amplifier that drive 0.9 ohms would be a very good amp if all other things were up to snuff. There are lots of both good an bad ways to drive an ohm.
No you’ve got that arse about face, the speaker is the problem being too hard to drive and the amp that can do it is a great amp, and will not only drive it but anything else as well. Definitely not a bad amplifier waiting to find a home.
Cheers George
Speakers are the designer's sonic goal, his taste, his dream. In many cases he doesn't care how he gets there. Some care and some do not care about the difficulty of their load, not their problem. I would suspect most people who are serious about speaker design have good rather universal amps with high damping, lots of current and voltage. Why wouldn't they? Therefore if you buy their dream you had better ask its characteristics or how they drove it.
On the other hand if someone is interested in 300B amps, like Jim Jordan, the speaker choices are limited and one is playing in an entirely different field which is not universal but has limitiations. Here the speaker/amplifier interactions are going to be important, obvious and likely hit you in the face like the Circulatron that produced a 8 db peak at 50 Hz and a marked loss of highs in my QUAD 63. The 8 dB peak surprised me so much I got a oscillator and meter and measured an 8dB rise at the speaker terminals at 50 Hz and many dB fall off about 400 Hz. The 63 was not longer Mr. Walker's 63.
In the HI FI world some people design speakers that are hard to drive, yet there are many amps capable of driving them. At a wide range of prices. So what is all the fuss about?
However what do we do with amplifiers that have high output impedance and limited current? People buy lots of them.
May I remind all that the topic of this thread is about what an autotransformer can do for matching the load to the amp. Whether or not a Gryphon sounds better than the old Mac is not the issue and certainly not the money which few can afford. I also find it odd that Gryphon is not in Stereophile Rec Components, nor could I find a review or any mesurements. If someone has a link I would love to see this amp's performance. Perhaps is all just a pretty face.