Atma-sphere S-30 with Reference 3A?

I used an S-30 with the deCapo for about 2 years and it worked very well. The deCapo has a wonderful mid band and the S-30 shows that to great effect. But, but, but...

the speaker has no deep bass and is a bit lean up into the mid-bass, Notwithstanding Duke's observation, above, IME the S-30 will do nothing to ameliorate that. The tonal balance of the speaker was pretty consistent with all of the amps I paired it with, but struck me as "even more evident" when paired with the S-30.

Good Luck,

Marty

Marty, thanks for posting your observation. I would guess that the gentle, fairly broad increase in energy in the 2 kHz region psychoacoustically more than offsets the fairly narrowband increase in energy in the upper bass region. I hadn't thought of that.

Duke

If Sean wanted to stick with Atma-sphere would a Speltz transformer to raise the impedance be adviseable, or the S-30 just less than ideal for the DeCapo?

I've never used the Speltz autoformers and can't speak to their effect on output power with impedance changes.

However the previous statement "Raising the impedance will also reduce the amplifier's power output" is incorrect with Atma-Sphere amps.

In fact just the opposite is true. The S-30 outputs 45WPC into a 16 ohm load and 60WPC into a 30 ohm load.