[bakufu]

i received a pair of 100se's the other day.  they replace a pair of high quality class d amps used to drive the mids and highs of my emerald physics cs1.3's, which i've been using for the last five or six months.

the original amps left me with the nagging feeling that the 1.3's were simply not coming to life.  the soundstage was wide and instrument placement was stable and accurate, timing seemed right, but the music itself lacked vitality.  it seemed like a diagram of the music, rather than the music itself.  just impressions, but i felt my mind wandering where it should have been locked onto the music.

well, all this changed when i replaced those two amps with a pair of 100se's.

i have to admit that up now i've always been something of a skeptic with regards to the importance of amplification.  how much difference could an amplifier really make?  watts is watts, right? 

at any rate, the difference these amps make is quite shocking. 

with the 100se's, the 1.3's have just come to life.  whereas previously the soundstage was flat and the highs were analytical and thin, now it's as though the musicians have stepped out of the vertical plane and are interacting with the room from the entire front half of my listening space.  as i said, the difference -- the magnitude of the difference -- is shocking.

when things are working right, you can't tear yourself away from listening.   and indeed, last night i spent four hours sampling my music collection to see what i've been missing over the last six months.

getting all the components to line up and play nicely with each other is surely a black art.  i haven't the foggiest idea why the 100se's match up so well with these extremely sensitive open-baffle speakers, but they most certainly do.

thanks dan!

previous systems include:  b&w 801-III, apogee divas, krell fpb300, krell fpb600, too many preamps and cd players to enumerate ...

the current system electronics, containing the new modwright amps:  http://www.nsl.com/audio/new/7.JPG

[Ern Dog]

Thanks for posting this.  I'm always interested in synergistic matches with speakers and amps.  I have a friend using the Emeralds and he uses a tube amp for the tweets and SS for the woofers- I forget what brands.

[modwright]

Thank you!  I have listened to Class D amplification in the past and decided that it is not a sound that I personally prefer.  We all have different tastes and preferences and many enjoy Class D.

I feel that with MosFET designs (KWA 100, 100SE and KWI 200) and BiPolar Output designs (KWA 150, 150SE) we can produce a musical presentation that I feel is more natural, organic and true to the music.

I appreciate your feedback very much!

Take care and enjoy!

Sincerely,

Dan W.

[bakufu]

for some people the most difficult thing to get right is the human voice.  for me, it's massed strings, especially playing in the upper registers.  my benchmark preferred sound is what you can hear in a good concert hall. 

over the years i've assembled a set of "test pieces" which exercise the ability of a system to reproduce the unique sounds produced by a string orchestra.  for example, the vaughan williams Tallis Fantasia has a nearly organ-like texture in certain passages, and schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht has tremendous warmth and liquidity.  ruggles' Suntreader is a contrapuntal nightmare, containing an enomous number of independent musical lines.

vaughan williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
strauss, Metamorphosen
messiaen, L'Ascension (arr. for orchestra)
schoenberg, Verklarte Nacht (arr. for string orchestra)
bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
beethoven, Grosse Fuge (arr. for string orchestra)
honegger, Symphony #2 for String Orchestra and Trumpet
ruggles, Suntreader

[Russell Dawkins]

Interesting you should say this, as massed strings were my benchmark when I was making my attempts to design speakers, this sound being the most difficult to reproduce of all orchestral sounds, apparently. In fact I don't think I have yet heard them done really well - no reproduction so far to me has that gossamer silky velvet fuzz riding on top that I hear in live performance. I think recordings are partly to blame, as well. That includes my own recordings, too, unfortunately.

One close approach was a recording done with Schoeps wide cardioid mics and a Schoeps Sphere for the main mic and hearing this through a pair of Etymotic research ER4Ss through a Headroom amplifier.

[bakufu]

the recordings i own are all over the board in this respect.  the orchestration, the players, the sound the conductor is aiming at, the concert hall, the engineering -- all of these must have some part to play in the result.  and that's even before the audio system and the room contribute their own parts.  sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't.

i must find time to listen again to two recordings which wowed me recently:  the honegger symphony #2, karajan/BPO on DG -- the first issue of that disk -- and a japanese DG cd of the grosse fuge with furtwangler and the berlin philharmonic.  the latter is war-time vintage, and mono, but big BIG mono, with weight and thunderous impact -- one of the most exciting recordings i know.  and yes, it is surprising that the karajan honegger sounds so good -- at least to me, on my system.  i'm willing to give up detail and clarity if shrill and piercing, early digital's best friends, will leave the room at the same time.

among the biggest disappointments is a series of bruckner recordings with haitink and the concertgebouw.  in other recordings by this conductor and this orchestra, there is tremendous hall ambience, and i expected that venue to be hospitable to bruckner, but no joy.  again, i must revisit to see if my first impressions were justified.

a recording i'm very fond of is the martinu double-concerto with mackerras and the czech p.o. on supraphon, and the string playing and sound on that disk is wonderful.

but again, and i didn't mention this in writing on the topic, this has turned out to be one of the most striking improvements in moving up to the kwa 100se's.  at least for orchestral music, the string section is the foundation on which everything else rests.

[Russell Dawkins]

I forgot to mention in my post that the other sound I use as a benchmark and also rarely is reproduced with veracity is the orchestral bass drum. I have not yet heard this done in a way that comes even close to the concert hall experience, and muse on the fact that the drum itself is a 5 foot diaphragm "driven" by a beater which  probably represents the equivalent of about 4,000 watts of power driving the typical "motor" in a cone speaker, and that the drum is, effectively, a dipolar device.

The way this appears to pressurize the concert hall is a wonderful thing to these audiophile ears.

[bakufu]

> The way this appears to pressurize the concert hall is a wonderful thing to these audiophile ears.

and audiophile chest and stomach!

[GWNG8]

I am new to the Modwright world (haven't purchased yet, but soon).....I thought the 100SE were only available as stereo....this makes it sound like you were using them as mono blocks...is this ocrrect?

[modwright]

The 100SE amp is only available as a stereo amp.  The speakers in question require 4+ channels of amplification, so he is using a pair of our amps, for a total of four identical channels of amplification, not two amps operating in mono.  Understandable how you could get that notion without full knowledge of the speaker setup.

Thanks,

Dan Wright

[GWNG8]

Any possibilities that there will ever be a mono 100?

[modwright]

More likely a Mono 200.  The transformer in the 200 is better suited to this.  We could do a bridged-mono version of the 200 as a straight amp.  In that config., it would put out ~ 600W into 8 ohms and literally about 1KW into 4 ohms.

I would have to test it out, but this is a possibility.  The difference between bridge mono and true mono however, is that a bridge mono amp sees the actual speaker load as 1/2 actual.  I.e. 8 ohm load is seen as 4 ohm load by amp.  This makes a 2 ohm load difficult, as the amps sees a 1 ohm load.  A 1 ohm load is not common and is VERY difficult for amps to drive.

I plan to experiment with both straight mono and bridged designs and see which is better.

There is also the possibility of a 100W Class A amp, but please understand that these are only in the THOUGHT PHASE!  New designs take time.  I DO appreciate the suggestions!

Sincerely,

Dan W.