Choking more SPL's out of Maggie 3.6's

"Don't rock" - One of the classic and commonplace criticisms of Maggies! (Which I love BTW, so everybody hold your fire...) You seem to have a really nice system and room for these speakers, which shows in your comments about other musical styles. You have covered most of the obvious bases: powerful SS monoblocks, dynamic subwoofer augmentation, speakers have room to breathe. I don't have the specific experience with your amp/speaker combo to say for sure, but you may well be up against the inherent nature of the Maggies. The only thing I can see that could buy you a little more headroom and slam would be to run crossed-over dual subs instead, with the panels and amps given a high-pass break, but that may not prove entirely satisfactory in other areas, and runs the risk of compromising some of what makes the present set-up shine on lighter fare.

I see four problems here.

1) To produce very high spl's, you have to move a lot of air. To move a lot of air, you have to have a lot of driver surface area that is capable of long excursions.

2) Panel speakers can't make long excursions even though some of them have plenty of surface area. As such, you will always be SPL limited so long as you expect them to reproduce ANY type of low frequency signals.

3) If you were to cross them over at a few hundred Hz so as to minimize excursion requirements, and run dynamic woofers NOT as sub-woofers but as woofers, you could get more out of your system. Only problem is that would surely change the presentation of what you are hearing and it seems as if you are not interested in doing that.

4) While i know that you ( and a bunch of others ) will cringe hearing this, you might want to think about trying out some different amps. As many folks here know, i'm not a fan of Bryston's for several reasons. My experience with them is that they do not work all that great with low impedance loads. In my experience and that of a few others that i talk to, Bryston's tend to run out of steam faster than other amps when driving lower impedance speakers. Lest you think i'm a nut, Stereophile noted this with the 7B's in a review a while back. Some other amps that they had on hand, rated for less power than the 7B's, were able to drive loads that the Bryston's were giving up on. Your experience here tends to support both my findings and those of that reviewer in Stereophile ( can't remember who it was ).

As the tube-heads will tell you, "watts ain't watts when it comes to SS vs Tubes". I've said the same thing when it comes to Bryston vs other decent SS amps at lower impedances. Having said that, you might want to check into a big Aragon or Classe' amp. I think that either of these brands will stomp what you have now in your specific situation, even if they are rated for slightly less power at 4 ohms. Sean
>

PS... Please don't hate me for sharing my honest opinion. I'm only trying to help and calling it as i see it : )

I thought about that too, Sean, but as I say, I don't have the specific experience with the Brystons to comment, and having to replace the amps that worked well with Rich's previous speakers would be just as much for him to comtemplate as getting different speakers to replace the Maggies. But the one thing I can say is that the Maggies aren't especially difficult loads, at least from the impedance standpoint. They require a lot of power, especially in bigger rooms (where they work best), due to their relative inefficiency, so it's always possible that an optimistically-spec'ed amp could run out of steam at high volumes, but the impedance is purely resistive and dead-flat at 4 ohms over the whole range, except for peaks at the crossover points. Any 4 ohm rated SS amp worth its salt should be unstressed as long as it can supply the desired power, and the Maggies themselves don't have the highest of limits before panel breakup can occur on certain program material. Though the amp scenario is a possibility, it is also true that Maggies in general - both to their credit and occasional detriment, depending on one's listening habits - do not convey the same sort of impact on loud rock material as dynamic speakers can manage. When I used to work in a store that sold the Maggie line, one of the longtime employees used to say wistfully that he would own a pair in a heartbeat, if only they could play heavy rock. Alas, the sound of Marshall stacks and SVT's is the sound of cone speakers in boxes; like everything else in audio, it's tough to be equally great at doing it all...

I have 3.6's in a similar sized room, and I can't hear myself sing- thank god! The amp I am using is a BAT VK-500w/bat pak, it seems to drive the speakers with aplomb. I think the previous posters hit all the technical reasons for whats' happening. But let me add one more thing, if you were to upgrade the external crossover you would gain frequency response in the lower octave(s) and output would be higher as well. One member at MUG, was flat to 36hZ in his room before after he measured flat to 25hZ and only slightly rolled off to 19hZ, though that's only going to make the load on your amp possibly more demanding. But hey at least you wouldn't be able to hear yourself sing :)