Talon Loudspeakers

Glreno: In a smaller to moderate size room with baroque chamber music, alternative female pop singers, Irish and scottish folk music etc. 3 to 3.5 Watts does quite nicely. If you Run them with a Roc you could probably run 2A3's in an even larger room and/or with larger scale stuff. I'd consider a 300B, but I want to wait and see what people think of the new Vaic Meshplate 300B's. I really wonder if you can get the same kind of air, midrange and upper frequency bloom out of a 300B. The Vaic Meshplate 2A3's also kick more serious heiny on the Talon's then you might imagine. No question the Talon's love triodes! James W.

Hi James! I got my Jota today and it drives the piss out of the Talons using the VV32B at 20watts per channel. It plays as loud as the Electrocompaniet AW120, which is what I was using previously. The Jota takes 310 volts from my P600, where as the Electrocompaniet took only 170 to drive the Talons. I agree! SET amps sound very good on the Talons.

Awesome bud! I keep trying to tell people how wonderful SET's and Talon's are and people tend to look at me funny or send me email's about how it can't be done. How big is your room and what type of stuff do you listen to and how loud? Would you mind comparing/contrasting the differences between the Electro and the Jota. James W.

That is an interesting comparison. The Jota actually has a less lush midrange than the Electrocompaniet. Both work extremely well with these speakers. I obviously like the Jota more, but I'm a tube guy. What is amazing is that the bass with this SET is awesome! It rattles the floor on some CDs. The solid state obviously is better to some degree, but not as much as you would think. The Jota gets the nod for inner detail, mid-range purity, and soundstaging. My tube biases probably come through with this comparison. I've never kept a solid state amp very long, but the Electrocompaniet is the best I've had. My room is 14 by 8 by 26. It is opens to another room on one side where the speakers are, and a huge, thick drape. I listen to just about everything except rap and country. I like new age, light jazz, easy listening, rock, musicals, classical....like I said, about everything else. I just got the new spikes for the Talons from Mike. They are much better than the ones that came with the speakers. I don't know if you are familar with the concept, but they aren't your normal spikes. Tierry has designed 3 made of a softer material then the forth. He says that this directs the mechanical energy to one spike or point source for dispersion into the floor instead of spreading it out into all four corners of the speaker. Creative, huh? I also just put multi-wave into my P300 and P600. Too many changes, too little time to listen.

Glreno: Out of curiosity do you think that leaness may be due to break-in. I would imagine it will take a couple of weeks just for the tubes to settle. My impression of my Meshplate 2A3's altered substantially over a hundered hours of running them. I wouldn't doubt the bass quality at all. I get fairly slamming bass with 3 watts although the level doesn't get real loud, but then it doesn't in any other part of the range either. But it is solid with drive, impact and detail that would make you smash almost any solid state I have heard including the big boys. And of course with Tierry's loading technique I'm getting around 20 Hz in a 17 foot long room. Impossible, nope it's in the loading. I have heard one of Tierry's older less sophisticated designs do close to 20hz in a friend 10 foot long room. Yeah I have seen the new spikes. They look very cool and I have no doubt they work very effectively. Until I can swing the cost, I'll use my audio point brass/standard steel spike combo which works quite a bit more effectively than all steel. I have to come up with the rest of the bucks to cover the new cobalt alloy output trannies I'm getting. I'd love to hear the Jota and I'll bet it will flesh out quite a bit over the next 100 hours or so of listening. I'll agree on the inner detail and mid-range purity that triodes have over anything. What might suprise you is that the Paraglows with meshplates have flat response out to 47K maybe a bit more. In combo with the Khorus the high's seem to have bloom and airiness with timbral details that go well beyond what I hear in Push/pulls and other highly review speakers. Bass response is flat to about 10Hz maybe a bit lower according to the guys who measure that stuff. It really is hard to listen to anything else. Yup I've become darn spoiled! James W. the tubes to