Hi all, I think this is the right circle, but if not, please let me know. I just purchased a pair of Avlar Prodigy speakers. It's a long story, but the bottom line is that they're really hard to come by and are really spectacular. It's a two way with a Focal woofer and an AMT that's inspired and acts very much like a Heil AMT. But the crossover is at 500Hz. The thing about the AMT is that it covers a huge frequency range and goes well past 24KHz, the highs are really airy and wide open.
At the shop I was auditioning them with Macintosh gear and they sounded great. Now that they're home, they're not doing so well and I could use some advice. I'm currently driving them with a Virtue Sensation 901, battery powered, with a Dodd tube buffer. And as my livingroom isn't a dedicated listening room, it isn't treated. The furniture actually helps quite a bit, but between the low ceilings and the wood floor and the speakers being tuned slightly on the bright side, well the high end is beginning to get a little screechy and fatiguing.
I took my Sensation into the shop today and we hooked it up to a pair of Avlars there. I'm happy to report that the Sensation held up very well compared to the Macs. But I definitely noticed a thinning out in the upper mids and I could detect just a hint of the high frequency harshness I was hearing at home. I was listening with one of the speaker designers, Paul, and he said the model we were listening to in the shop was slightly darker than the one I took home.
We discussed adding another resistor to the crossovers to tame the ATM's some more, but in his opinion these speakers respond really well to biamping and an active crossover.
So at this point, considering I can't do much with the room, this is what I'm thinking: drive the low end with the Sensation, which is a Tripath based amp and get a good tube amp for the ATM. I think the ATM needs something more on the mellow side of things and it has a very high sensitivity, 100db/1W, so I can get by with a low power amp. And the active crossover will give me more flexibility to work with the room acoustics.
Paul suggested a Marchand tube crossover - the XM26 - but we're talking a couple of grand with an amp on top of that. I don't have that kind of $$ right now and frankly I've purchased almost my whole current kit, piece by piece from you guys here on AC and have learned a whole lot on the way to boot, so I want to keep going in that direction.
I see there are quite a few tube amps listed in the trading post right now and I want to jump on all of them
but I really don't know the different sound characteristics of a push/pull vs SET vs. SEP, 300b vs. 2A3 vs. EL84 and all the rest, so I would really appreciate your thoughts on this. I'm not very handy with a soldering iron, but I'm not afraid to roll tubes, op amps, jumpers, etc.
I might be able to throw an area rug on the floor, but that's about it. Any thoughts?
