Deltatrippers:
I intended to make a comment in response to your post, but forgot. I ran the original Revel Salons for three years and at least with respect to the original Salon, believe that the standard advice about powering the speaker at the time, which was that it sounded best with massive amplification, was dead wrong. The first and current versions of the Salons both use high-order crossovers and proprietary drivers that can handle a lot of power - one of my dealers had a customer that ran a pair of the original Salons with 1,200 watt monoblocks and they indeed can go extremely loud, cleanly. But this misses a crucial point, which is that the Salons are also very much a finesse speaker that comes a lot closer than many state-of-the-art speakers do at accurately reproducing the sound of unamplified acoustic instruments (i.e., most of the music in the classical and jazz genres). If you put a typical high-powered amp on Salons, the global feedback used to stabilize the circuits in such amps is clearly audible. If you search the threads, you'll see a lot of complaints about the speaker sounding lifeless and two-dimensional - that's because they tend to be demo'd with high-powered solid-state amps, often Levinson 300 series amps, which all use global feedback.
In short, the original Salons actually sound best, if the realistic reproduction of musical instruments is your goal (as opposed to shaking the neighborhood with home theater content), with lower powered, 100 to 150 watt amps that feature fewer output devices (i.e., fewer output tubes or transistors) and preferably, little or no global feedback - these speakers are very revealing and transparent like few others, and you really can hear what the upstream components are doing. Perhaps because the original version of the Salons can now be found used for $4,500 used, people think that they can be used with any old equipment - they can't. 100 high-quality tube or solid-state watts really lets them play music. If you want to reproduce dinosaurs stomping, and they can certainly do that very well, too, then run them with huge solid-state monoblocks, but if you want music, put a high-quality, zero-feedback tube amp on them - they can be really good speakers. As for the Salon 2, I don't have any meaningful time with them, but would imagine that they're even more demanding of quality amplification given their beryllium tweeters.
