Considering the New Tekton Design Encores? AND Owners Group - Experiences/Questions

@jcarcopo

I greatly appreciate your contributions to this forum! For a long time I planned to order Moabs, but now I think Encores might be a better fit -- bit smaller physically yet smoother musically(?). Music is primarily classical. I plan to bi-amp with tubes on top and ss bottom. 

My question is about tubes: Is there much difference between set and push-pull for orchestra string quality? I'm thinking push-pull would have more power for mids, no? 

Thanks for comments.

@coot Thanks for the kind words. I’ve never heard the Moabs, but I like to think to the Encores are special and believe Eric would mirror that sentiment as well.

Regarding bi-amping: I’m not a fan of it, it’s really unnecessary with the Encores. Whether 60wpc or 15wpc I still achieve at least 94db peaks at 10ft away with zero compression and no soft clipping. That being said usually if you’re going to do it, the amps typically are identical, and mixing topologies like SET and SS are not going to have remotely similiar gain structures or sound signatures. Can you gain match the amps and make it work with an active crossover or passive volume controls, yes, but should you? I wouldn’t. That being said SETs excel at glorious midrange and highs and give up a bit of authority in the bass (sometimes) due to a lack of feedback and damping (there are pros and cons to this approach)
, so if you’re going to do it and with non-identitcal/dissimilar signature topology amplifiers (which I wouldn’t recommend), at least keep the SET on the mids and highs, and keep the ss on the bass where feedback and damping belongs. If properly gain matched it will sound only disjointed. WHY? Well, I’m glad you didn’t ask 😁, but I’ll tell you why. I heard a $10k speaker I pined for years ago called a DB99 by Von Schweikert. It was a speaker designed for SET amplifiers and came powered with its own SS amplifier to handle the bass region fed by the output signal of your own SET amp. The idea being the SET amp could feed its flavored signal to the ss amp and therefore minimize the disjointed disconnect between the way a SET sounds and ss sounds while allowing the SET to handle only the high and mid frequencies . It sounded awful. I hated it. I tweaked the gain settings on the ss amp all night and never got that thing to sound coherent and right.

Furthermore, the Encores come bi-wireable, not bi-ampable, but don’t let that stop you from paying Eric to make them biampable, anything is possible. Surely that is in his capabilities.

I’ve been using SET amplification for over 20 years. When I was about 25 years old I had access to a bunch of solid-state and tube amps to audition over many months at a high end boutique in CA I helped out. After hearing many different amplifiers I took an Art Audio Diavolo SET Tube Amplifier home for a weekend and enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn’t afford it anyway so I brought it back to the store. A month of torment goes by and I’m thinking out of everything I had heard that Diavolo was the only thing that had a purity in the midrange and a 3d holographic nature that nothing else I had heard possessed. I meekishly asked the owner one day about it. He explained to me why it sounded the way it did. (Simplest topology, pure class A, no phase-splitter/zero cross-over distortion, pleasant 2nd/3rd order harmonic distortion characteristics that went along with the musical signal, etc) I had just moved to my new studio and I wanted to try it one more time before committing to it and he of course said "sure". It sounded even more glorious in my new place. Me and a friend were both picking our jaws off the floor it sounded so good. The next day I asked the owner "how much?". He sold it to me for $2500, it retailed for $6999. I literally was prepared to pay double that price, but I acted very nonchalant and paid him enthusiasticly. I’ve owned 2 versions of the Diavolo, and now I own the Allnic A6000s SETS. All I know is SETs, and I’ve never heard anything at ANY show or ANY store or ANY fellow audiophile’s house to make me think of switching to ss or pp tube equipment.

Sorry for the long-winded trip down memory lane. So to recap. I’m firmly in the buy, beg, or borrow, but get a SET amp camp and no, a push-pull tube amp, even in SE MODE isn’t the same thing. 😁

Hope this helps you out. Now go biamp some Encores! 😉

Coot,

fwiw, as I mentioned on the other thread, if you run a SS or Class D amp with only 10k input impedance for bass in particular, That will not match well with most tube pre-amps. That impedance issue will create distortion and result in poor bass most likely.

Can you tell me what pre-amp you use? That would help settle that.

If currently you use tube pre-amp with your 10k input impedance Class D amps, that might well account for any bass issues with your Ohm 5000s ( or any other speakers driven similarly for that matter) which should be able to deliver as much clean bass as desired, though since driver is downward firing you might not feel as much slam with Ohm Walsh in the bass as others with bass drivers firing towards your listening position. 

If you have an impedance mismatch from Pre amp to amp, I would address that first otherwise any speaker change may make little difference.

Also I recall your room was odd shaped with one speaker closer to side wall than other. The adjustments on the 5000s should be just what the doctor ordered to tame bass as needed. It could be harder to get other speakers to work well there unless you have some other way of tuning left versus right speaker specifically as needed.

Hi jcarcopo, 
Thanks for the trip down memory lane as I can appreciate it thoroughly.  You discovered SETs earlier in life than I.  I went through the solid state amplifiers then tube push pull route for a number of years. My introduction to SET amplification happened about 11 years ago.  My recognition of their superb attributes mirrors your accurate  description.  It was quite definitive and unmistakable. Jcarcopo, there's been no looking back 😊. 
Charles 

Jcarcopo,
I realize that bi-amping is fairly popular but I believe that your perspective as it relates to the Encore is very rational. It would seem that these speakers don’t need it and are better off with a single high quality amplifier.
Charles