Eminent Technology 8b Speakers - Amp/wattage Recommendations

Thanks for the LSA suggestion. 

I admittadly have limited experience with class D amps, GAN or otherwise. But one benefit of Class D is their lack of weight. A home demo can be arranged w/o incurring a fortune in shipping costs. 

In general I prefer tubes. Too me, they breath life into music. If GAN changes the equation, I don't know. 

Thanks decooney. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Agreed, a call to EMT will likely result in some clarity here. 

I once measured my existing system using a sound meter in a much smaller room. I was amazed at how loud 95dB actually is. I can't imaging playing any speakers lounder than that other than a brief moment. So my use of "fairly loud" was not meant to imply rock concert levels hur after hour. My most likely use will be in the high 80dB levels for an hour or two. 

@jwr159 your update helps understand better, and 'hour or two" here and there would be fine for the M120s alone without bi-amping, I believe.  Best to ask EMT. Good fun.  👍

If it was me, I’d match them with a Cary SLP-98 preamp and a Parasound A21+ or maybe two. You'll have your tube goodness and the power you need to play loud.

@jwr159 for tube amps, you are on the right track with the M120s, if you can find them. I run a Cary SLP-98 as @russ69 mentioned, btw. If you bi-amp with say a capable tube amp for the upper section (which sounds glorious on those speakers btw) and some higher power SS amp for the lower woofer-bass-drive, you are going to need some kind output level control to balance it out. I’d start with one amp first, try it out before jumping to bi-amping. The QS Mono 120s work well with your 8bs, with those extra-large quality transformers. It’s not about the watts per se’, it’s about quality of power/current/transformers applied for those speakers.

I've heard the 8bs and 16s with a high quality (exceptional) 10wpc tube integrated before. It's possible, yet again its about the quality vs. quantity of power in this case.