Apogee Scintilla Power

I don’t have it anymore, but back in the 90’s, I drove my Apogees with a McIntosh MC-2300.  It ran them easily I might ad.  The Mac was rated safe to a half ohm, if I’m remembering correctly.

The  only headache were Macs silly speaker screw terminals.  But some well made spade lugs took car of that.

The 2300 could drive the Scintillas to silly volume.  You will be surprised at how good the bass response can be, when driven by a strong amp.

Musical Fidelity AMS-100 in a modern amp 

we sold Apogee and Acoustat and Jim’s amp is a decent match for sure. The big CJ with autoformers also works w magic midrange 

Several excellent options not previously mentioned: Roger Sanders Magnatech, or his earlier Innersound Electrostatic amplifier or one of the Coda amplifiers. Any of these can dump very very large quantities of very high quality current into your apogees without breaking a sweat, at very (IMHO) reasonable prices.

westerlm
Apogee Scintilla Power

The Apogee Scintilla are only 79db so you’ll need "at least" 150watt/8ohm to get them going.
But they go down to 0.9ohm right through the lower bass and also 1.2ohm around 1-2khz in the upper midrange.
http://www.lippaudio.org/old/MySystems/Scintilla/impedance.html

So this says, that the amp should come "close" to doubling it’s wattage for each halving of impedance from 8ohms right down to 2ohms. Look at big amps with bi-polar (bjt) output stages. eg Krell KSA250 or similar ect ect ect
Anything else "may sound OK" but will be a compromise, especially tubes, and won’t get the best from them.

EG:
150w/8ohm
300w/4ohm
600w/2ohm

Cheers George

Great feedback. Confirmation as well as some new thoughts.

For my Apogee Duetta Signatures the Mc MC7270 (with autoformer) works pretty well but my CJ MF2500a (bipolar) is fantastic. Using it in a bi-wire configuration is most coherent. Using it with my CJ Premier 11a on high end in gain matched (26db), passive bi-amp set up is also VERY good with tube magic on the MRTW ribbons just a bit lagging with some attack transients (ie.guitar strings, piano, etc.).

For my Apogee Scintilla's the Mcintosh MC7270 runs out of gas. It can definitely handle the load fine with autoformers. The CJ MF2500a works well on the high end MRTW ribbons but does heat up. The CJ Premier 11a cannot play anywhere with the, Scintillas. The Sunfire 300's with Scintilla mod speak for themselves. I have recently picked up a Plinius SA250 MkIV that is being refreshed and turned into a Reference. Has proven to operate steady at 1ohm load handling scintilla dips down to .85ohms with high power and current. Operates in class A and class AB for some flexibility and energy savings. We shall see how it goes. Plinius, will be done in a month but Scintilla rework is a few months out for the ultimate test. When that happens I will get some feedback out for anyone that may be interested. Thanks again for  all the feedback.