@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! 😉
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! 😉