I have Maggie MG 1.6's - need amp advice

Eldartford, this comment

Most solid state amps are power-limited by current. Tube amps, whose power supplies run at several hundred volts, may hit an output voltage ceiling, resulting in a flat top on a sinusoidal signal called (for obvious reasons) "clipping". Their distortion rises slowly with power until it takes a sharp knee upwards at clipping. Solid state amps do not have such a sharp knee distortion increase, and for them "clipping" is generally taken as the power level where the gradually-increasing distortion reaches one percent.

-is not correct. All amplifiers 'clip'. Solid state amps do so with odd orders, meaning that their clipping is harsher than that of tubes (and is one of the reasons that there is the story of tube 'power' being more effective than transistor 'power' as we have seen so often in other threads). It is true that with most transistor amps by the time they have reached 1% THD, they are clipping while this may not be true for some tube amps. There is a distinction here.

Beyond that you are right, power is power regardless of the amp that makes it, so if the amp makes the power that is demanded by the load and the output voltage than the current will be there too. Maggies are a fairly resistive load, so the 'current' that everyone speaks of cannot exist without the 'voltage' IOW: power.

"I canna change the laws of physics!" -Scotty

Atmasphere...OK: if you drive a ss amp hard enough it will clip. But (at least some that I have seen) the shape of the distortion vs power graph is characteristically different from tube amps. (However, I just checked the Hypex UcD digital amp module, and it does exhibit a sharp break like a tube amp, but then it is starting from way below 0.1 percent, so maybe it just looks dramatic. Perhaps it takes clipping to get distortion that high). As for the 1% distortion level occuring before clipping in a tube amp I think that this simply reflects the generally higher distortion levels of quite well regarded tube amps.

My ss amps have clip limiting. I doubt that I would approach their 600 watt rating, but if I did a gain reduction would prevent cliping, and its tweeter-damaging distortion. At lower power level the clip detection circuitry does nothing except listen to the signal so I don't think there is any adverse effect on the sound. Cheap tweeter insurance.

No Doubt!! Clipping any large amp will eat tweeters pretty fast.

Although tube amps do have more THD in general, the idea is to generate less of the distortions the ear *objects* to, and tubes are quite good at that. This goes back to that 'tube power' 'transistor power' debate (personally to me watts is watts so I use the idea of 'usable power' instead of tube/transistor power- the idea conveys easier).

That's one nice advantage of bi-amping. You can have a nice sweet tube amp (like an AtmaSphere M60/w. Zero's) on the tweeter panel, and use a big honking high current solid state amp on the bass panel.

Check out this article from TNT-Audio that discusses the issues around crossovers that can be addressed by actively amplifying your speaker:

http://www.tnt-audio.com/casse/active_speakers_intro1_e.html
http://www.tnt-audio.com/casse/active_speakers_intro2_e.html

Hope this helps!

One person mentions them above, but a 2nd plug for Pass Labs. If you can find a used Aleph what you get per dollar spent is very hard to beat. Stereophile showed that these perform super well into amazingly low ohm loads. They provide serious current and the Aleph line purchased used may be cheap enough to run bi-amped at the high wattage levels. For real fun, get 4 monoblocks bi-wired. Price would keep most from doing that with new amps of similar quality... 4 Aleph 1's into 1.6s would put power issues to rest quite quickly!! Right now there are indeed 4 Aleph 0's for sale here - not nearly as powerful, but with 4 amps at those prices, would be awesome.