Anybody Felt Lower-End ARC preamps Bass-Shy?

Be careful not to tune your system to fit one, perhaps not so great, recording. If your system is neutral and truthful it will show you how some recordings are wonderful and many are not.

Your system should not be making bass that isn't present on the recording.

Hard to believe the Plinius is having a tough time with 805's, but if you say so. I have dual Mk3's and one of the main reasons is to go fully balanced, which is not possible with RCAs.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1147688305&openflup&11&4#11

Ngjockey, I am not driving the 805's with the Plinius as they are 'easy' speakers. It's the PMC LB1 Sigs which have Dynaudio drivers. It's surprising these monitors can be quite power-hungry -250W/4ohms with a rather low sensitivity. The SA-100Mk3 only delivers 180W/4ohms and the difference is clearly apparent between running the speakers full-range and high-passing them. I also wished the Mk3 was sufficient for the PMC's but this didn't seem to be the case.

Although I felt the system sounded good high-passed with a subwoofer, I was intrigued by the benefits of running the speakers full-range after reading some comments from others here.

Thanks for the link on the informative thread.

Ryder, I run my ARC LS-25 with Pass Labs X250.5 amp driving the B&W N803 with absolutely no problems. Bass is the best it's ever been in my system, courtesy of the Pass amp.

Try getting an amp or double up on Plinius so the speakers can be given adequate amounts of power so they can be run full-range. To me this is probably the way to go...unless you are used to your sub and you'd rather have it in there.

Dynaudio are very good drivers, but almost every speaker I have heard that used Dynaudio drivers, like plenty of power.

Good luck.

Hi Audphile, I suppose you won't have any problems driving the N803's with the X250.5 since it's a powerful 250W amp that can run into 4 ohms load. I will most definitely get a 2nd Plinius amp and run my speakers full-range but the sub still needs to be there since the PMC's are limited to 35Hz only, and there's a lot of low bass missing.

Off-topic. I just recently listened to some Marten Duke speakers driven by Gryphon Tabu amp. The highs on the Marten Duke is better with a cleaner and more refined sound(due to the ceramic tweeter that extends to 40kHz) but midrange down to the bass the PMC's are better to my ears. Not too bad since the Dukes can buy 2 pairs of my speakers. I think I'll be sticking with my speakers for a while.