Pass Aleph-3 questions

Your simply running out of steam and need more amplifier. It takes current to produce large quantities of bass. Once the amplifier is saturated, it will not be able to reproduce the current demanding bass as easily as it can the non-current demanding mids and treble. The end result is exactly what your experiencing, thinning out at higher volumes. On top of this, clipping causes an immeasurable amount of harmonic content to be generated, causing even more mid and high frequency energy to be passed onto the speakers. This is the reason that "clipping" burns out tweeters. They are simply seeing a far higher ratio of energy than they would under normal listening conditions.

If your driving your Aleph 3 this hard, adding another will NOT be enough to do the job correctly unless you ran them as monoblocks. Quite honestly, i don't know if those can be easily converted or not. Even if they could, i don't think that it would give you everything that your looking for. In effect, you would really need to at least quadruple your power in order to maintain a reasonable amount of headroom IN MY OPINION. If you REALLY like this amp and want to keep it, you might want to think about using it for the top end and picking up a similar ( larger ) amp and going into active bi-amplification. That is, if your speakers will support something like that. While this could become pretty costly, especially if you went with another "beefier" Aleph model, it would be about the only way to maintain the same sonic signature while avoiding clipping or "thinning" at high volumes. Sean
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Sean,thanks for the reply.I should have been clearer.I would run 2 Aleph-3's as monos.I believe this may work.Anyone doing this?

Assumming you can bi-wire your speakers, you can try vertical, passive bi-amping with 2 Alephs and it should make a very noticable improvement. Part of this is because you have twice the power available (3 DB) but also, each amp will see the load from only one driver and that driver's half of the x-over and not the entire x-over. Also the impedance of the woofer half will tend to rise with increasing frequency and that of the tweeter will tend to rise with decreasing frequency. This will unload the amps somewhat from having to deliver as much current compared to looking into the entire x-over. Sound stage will get wider & deeper. The presentation will be more dynamic as well as more at ease. If you can get another Aleph 3, I highly recommend you try it. If you still run out of gas, try the Aleph 2.

One other consideration is the pre-amp. I say this because the Aleph 3 has a very low gain of only 20 DB. This means that you may actually be asking your preamp to supply some gain as well (in these days of digital & analog stages with high output voltages, most pre-amps are acting as attenuators). There is the possibility that you are stressing the pre-amp as well.

David- I had an Aleph 3 for a while and then went to the 2s, and I can tell you if you are looking for a lot more power the 2s may dissapoint you, as they don't really go that much louder. I think that the 3 may even sound slightly better. The few times that I clipped my 3 it was not something that was hard to notice, it was very apparent. By the way I was able to play fairly loud volumes with an Adcom GFP 750 in passive mode and a set of Dunlavy 4 speakers (91 db sensitivity)