Infinity Renaissance 90 questions

i feel the speaker is the last of your components in a system that is heard and the most critical component in your system, you can run a kmart speaker on the worlds best electronics and it will sound ok but if you run the worlds best speaker on "kmart" electronics i feel it will always sound better than the after mentioned.
greg

Sorry I don't agree, and especially in the case of the R.90 a weak electronic will show you 10% of these speakers. I gave my Fet nine + OCM 200 (from David Belles) to a friend who has a couple of 20 years very modest & old Canton bookschelves speakers, you should hear how they are sounding now! ... we were very surprised.
It's like with cars do you prefer to have a Ferrari with an engine of Mini or a Mini with an engine of Ferrari?
My choice is done ;-)

It's an age old discussion point. The safe statement is to say that any system is only as good as the weakest link. However, as a part time amplifier designer I can say that there is infinitely more scope for design variations with amps than there is with speakers, which is the opposite to what most people might expect. It's also a fair point to state the amplifier > speaker interface and the complex load presented by the speaker can and does induce distortions in every amplifier - but very differently depending on the ampifier design. This can be a huge source of confusion for audiophiles who spend a great deal of time changing their power amplifiers for the best possible result only to find after an upgrade of speakers that the amp sounds mediocre when compared with one they had previously discarded. Of course these statements are most true of low to mid priced amps but they can also sometimes apply to very expensive designs. I regard Krell highly because in my experience they produce close to the the same sound regardless of the speaker load presented. When you hear differences between speakers you can be far more certain that they are indeed differences between speakers. Not too long ago I was visiting someone who loved AR preamps. He was demo'ing differences between interconnect cables to the power amp and he believed that his AR must be better than his Krell because it was showing up big differences while the Krell did not. Of course the reality was that the different cables had very different amounts of capacitance which was exposed by the relatively high output impedance of the tube preamp. Unfortunately I was not able to convince him that this was the case. That's not to say that I don't believe that cables can make a difference but from my experince as an amp designer I have found that a small change to an amplifier gain stage - even a small change to a resistor value can result in a far bigger change than you can get by changing cables.

if you where to run your Fet nine + OCM 200 on one of those cheap speakers with all paper cone drivers, tweeter included (vintage radio shack), and compare them to the ren 90's driven by any bottom line brand receiver, i think that the ren 90's would still sound better, someone should run a blind test. LOL
greg

Hi Timpani, You're right. Thanks for clarifying what you meant..I had that "Ah ha" moment!..Kudos to the IRS Epsilon & Carie Christie..what a genius (shakes his head with smile). Yup well I say if you spend $14000.00, you deserve a little extra sugar in your coffee (or an extra membrane in your Tweeter!) Damn straight Timpani, we are getting old aren't we! I can still vividly recall old Stereophile articles going back to the 80's (scary). Your comments on the Rens and Emit/Emims are very interesting!

I digress, thanks for the tip on the set up of the Rens. I'll start out at 90° and then work in small increments up to 1/4 of an inch as Okeeteekid suggested. I do agree with upstream electronics & the weakest link theory. Weighing up weather to plug all my high end pc's into a cheap powerboard, or invest in a high end filter, i've decided to snap up RS's new Jaco 'Elite' power filter. The new Elite incorporates much of the guts of the Dmitri filter & other design features and does look good. I also like the idea of being able to buy high-end US grade Oyaide plugs on my pcs (otherwise unavailable to the OZ market), alas I wont hijack a thread on the 90's..there is another chewing on that subject.

After upgrading all my cables, power supply & isolation this year, it will be fun saving for my big Classe & AR next year. Now that certainly is a Ferarri (with a pretty sexy body too).

Timpani, what a difference a day makes in the life of an audiophile. After weighing up the benefits $4000.00(AU) was going to make to my system invested in either a line filter or in a high end re-design/re-wire & external x-over mod to my Rens, I realized ok, they're in great shape BUT they are 14 years old, and wiring and caps would have degraded to a certain extent...added to which, that's an opportunity to replace $8 per meter internal cable with $800.00 per internal wire & replace the 5% standard value caps with the best sounding sounding caps around. All the comments from IRS-Sigma owners I admit at first made no sense to me, but with your clarification, yeah obviously their superior crossover does make a noticeable difference. The re-design I am planning however is on a much higher order & results should be stunning. The new x-over will make the Rens more efficient as well. This is significant in itself in with this mod, I should be able to achieve the same stunning results as guys like Clavil running a single big iron amp & pre. I think that is a smarter solution to bi-amping, do you agree? And yes, I will proudly wear my gold medal for the backflip, thank you!