Merlin TSM with Manley Mahi-Mahi?

Reb, from what I recall, at least on paper, the weak link with what you have currently may be the match of the Manley pre-amp to that particular BC amp, with 20K input impedance as I recall. It may sound fine as is but I would expect things would be more articulate and controlled with a Class D amp designed to work well with tube preamps. These typically have 60K input impedance unbalanced or higher. I'd expect a tube amp to provide similar benefit and mate well with the tube pre-amp.

Bobby likes Manley. EL84s are wonderful tubes - so I can't see why the Mahi Mahi would not be an excellent amp for driving the TSMs - it is certainly enough power, and switching to triode might also work nicely for small scale acoustic music. Oh, and the Shrimp will work alot better with the input impedance of a tube amp.

From manley website:

Mahi Input Impedance: 110 Kohm

That alone will make a difference in the sound for the better I would wager relative to the BC S300 (20 Kohm I believe, though stock Icepower is only 10K ohm as I recall), perhaps more so even than tubes versus SS or Class D technology in of itself.

BC ref series Icepower amps cost more but have 100Kohm unbalanced input impedance. I can vouch that this works extremely well with an ARC sp-16 tube pre-amp, which is why I believe BC ref series and others like Wyred do mods to stock Icepower for this, ie to work better with tube pre-amps.

BTW, I have strongly considered the Manley Stringray integrated as the next amp I would try in my second (A/V) system if I ever decide to invest more in that rig. I always use a sub on that rig which makes using a tube amp with my various inherently tube unfriendly speakers like the Dyns and OHMs a viable option, I think.

Guys,

Thanks for all the posts.

I remember when I was first changing my amplification from an integrated amp to separates, I was fretting over the whole input/output impedance question. As it turns out, the Shrimp is somewhat unique in that it will "drive almost anything," because its output impedance is only 50 ohms! It is thus, in theory as I understand it, one of the only valve preamplifiers that constitutes a good match for the S300, which has an input impedance of 10k ohms.

In any case, I suspect that the combination of the mahi-mahi's with the Shrimp would be very sweet. I'm thinking about it…