B & W Matrix 801 S3 and tube amplifier

At your price range you need class D powerful amp such as Red Dragon or Wyred4sound.

I recommend Mark Levinson for the 801 series 3. You should be able to pick up a 23 or 23.5 in your price range. If you go with Levinson you will want to sell your CJ preamp and look for a Levinson preamp.

I agree with Rrog and would add the Classe CAM 350 amps. I used them for 6 months with 801's and performed pretty darn good.

Good Luck

We ran smaller/ mediem tube amps on them Quicksilver mono's and ARC and the quality was all there for acoustic jazz I would try it with the CJ . JohnnyR.

Pvctor - I am wondering if a 60W tube amp such as Conrad Johnson MV 60 or Premier 11A would do the job for mostly low level listening in a small-mid size room. Does anybody have experience with similar combination ?

Hi Pvctor – hows it going fellow canuckeer ?

Yes it should work.

But like anything else in this hobby especially an amp it should be trialed – imo – unless the money involved is no big deal so you can sell it later if you don’t like it.

Set the amp for the 4 ohm tap. My Music Reference RM9 tube amp sounds great with my 801’s at 4ohms. My Classe amp sounds ok with them too.

The 801’s are a fairly easy medium load - imo. Acoustats are a hard load. FrenchFries gave good advice imo – they are looking for a clean signal and don’t go down to 1 or 2 ohms.

The better the signal the better the sound quality. They are like looking in the mirror as far as your gear/room goes.

I asked the fellow that made my OTL’s that I run my 801s with about that CJ amp.

His reply.

“This amp is a copy of the Williamson circuit from 1947 without the driver stage. Not very quick and average bass performance.
The typical EL-34 and KT-88 output tubes have very high resistance necessitating a large turns ratio in the output transformer. On these type of tube amplifiers if a 8 ohm output is connected to a 4 ohm speaker the primary of the output transformer almost doubles in impedance. This affects the power transfer from the output tubes to the transformer resulting in reduced output wattage. The performance will not suffer, just the output.”

Cheers

05-06-13: Marakanetz
frequently blown output tubes guarranteed even at low listening levels as the best case scenario while could be far more complicated problems driving loads that substantially exceeding the amplifier abilities. tube pre OK, but not tube amp.

Must have been quite the scene at your place Marakanetz... When did you own the 801s and what tube amp ?