ICE Amps for classical music?

Almarg... My house has been standing for about 180 years, and is not apt to fall down due to the 1812 overture ! After I built the subwoofer system I did have problens with rattling windows, but it was easy to find what was loose and fix it.

200 feet is too close. Where do you keep your horses :-)

Kijanki... The Maggies don't have to reproduce the subwoofer frequencies. Keeping up is simply a matter of balancing the gains. I have actually tested my system for compression at high SPL and find none up to the maximum my ears will tolerate.

Also please note that I also play quiet music, and believe that the large cones, with their minimal excursion (like a Maggie diaphram by the way) are beneficial. My large drivers have appropriately large magnetic systems, and give away nothing in the way of transient response to 7 or 8 inch woofers.

Evidently you don't like pipe organ music. That's OK. I can't stand pop.

I never thought about it before but a truly state of the art system should be able to knock a house down (I suppose)!

Oh, well, back to the drawing board....

My house has a suspended wooden floor. The foundation is made of 100 year old bricks. The house does tremble when one of those boom boom boy toys drive by. There are little cones of brick dust in the basement.

I have emergency door lock keys that sit on top of the frame of each door with such a lock on it in my house.

Despite sitting on a thinly carpeted concrete foundation, these keys will without fail vibrate off the frame and fall to the floor a few minutes into a moderately high volume listening session on my big OHM 5s.

Other than that, the effects are not too obvious but you can feel the music just fine a good ways back from the speakers when a decent (not even great) quality recording is playing.

A few commented that peak creshendo takes only small fraction of time of the recording (and I agree with it) and therefore is not worth investing in truthful reproduction of these peaks (and I disagree STRONGLY with it).

Simon Thacher of Spectron who is both (retired)EE and (former) concert pianist wrote enire paper on this subject in Enjoy The Music last year:
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/manufacture/0708/index.html

For lazy, he explained there what kind of distortions occur at the peaks and conclude with:

"The exploration of the origin of "listener fatigue" is extremely interesting, at least, for this writer. We believe that when our subconscious mind detects a even small unnatural trace of distortion in reproduced acoustic music (which is not recognized yet as a very low level irritant by the analytical part of our brain) it activates a subtle alarm. This forces the listener into the tense or alert mode. Indirectly supporting this hypothesis is the common description we hear from Spectron users who utilize the two powerful monoblock amplifiers (7 kW peak power, each): "how relaxing" is my listening now."

So, unless you in flute music or country music or pop and wish to avoid listener fatigue - you better pay more attention to peaks - equally or more as you pay attention to other attrubutes of your equipment.

Personally, the combination of Joule-Electra "most romantic as per Harry Pearson" LA-300ME preamp, Spectron monoblocks and B&W 802D is THE best I own and auditioned then any system at any cost. PERIOD!!!!

All The Best
Rafael