Spatial Audio Raven Preamp

@wsrrsw

Good, sounds like you are on the right road. Subs are tricky. Good luck. I am sure you are getting some nice imaging and very real sounding instruments with great dynamics. Klipsch and bass... well...... that is not their strong point (but I didn’t say that out loud)

@donsachs

Quick question.  My speakers are 90dbs, can your 300b mono blocks give me, say 85db of sound?

Thanks in advance.

@curiousjim

The answer is probably yes.  We have run them with 86 dB 4 ohm speakers and it worked just fine.  What kind of load is your speaker?  Can you tell me the speaker so I can look up the spec?  Unless it is some sort of terrible reactive load and you are trying to create rock concerts in a cathedral they would probably work just fine.

A pair of subs don’t need to be exotic or anything, just fill in the gap below the horn cutoff. And two are definitely better than one. I prefer stereo bass, but the home theater folks use a mono input to drive 2, 3, or 4. I don’t care about sound effects on movie soundtracks (who cares), but do care about wideband sound.

One thing about the Blackbirds is they will tolerate absurdly reactive loads, since they are push-pull Class A and do not use feedback. No protection circuits are needed.

When I was playing around with Cornwall IV I pulled all the cheap $4 MKP caps out of the crossover and replaced them with vcap odam.  I put path audio resistors in there as well.  The main resistor directly in series with the midrange compression driver was a $1 sand resistor on a $5000 pair of speakers.  I was not impressed.  The sonic improvement was quite staggering.  I then used a pair of decent quality Hsu subs run with their speaker level inputs with pigtail cables from each speaker.  I simply ran a stereo pair of subs, one by each speaker.  Much better....   Finally sold it all and got a custom pair of open baffle speakers made with a horn as the top end.  Embarrased the Cornwalls and sub combo  .....  Klipsch are lots of fun, but they are not the top of the heap when stock.  They can be improved. Hence the millions of Klipsch modding threads in the world.