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Hard to say... one advantage the Crown has is a built-in high pass crossover which helps a lot at higher volumes with bass-heavy music. It will allow the speakers to play at higher volumes with better clarity, less IMD (inter-modulation distortion). And it makes a good sub amp, so in the future if you upgrade you can re-purpose it for subwoofer duties.
What would you set the high pass crossover to?
I set mine to 50 Hz. It's a 24 dB/oct filter so it rolls the bass off very quickly. The goal is to avoid sending the speakers a signal below the tuning frequency of the enclosure, at these frequencies the enclosure does little to nothing to control the motion of the cone. At frequencies above the port tuning the cone motion is very well controlled... this is the big advantage of a ported box, the cone excursion is far less than a comparable sealed box. The 50 Hz xo point makes integration with a sub very easy and you would not believe how much sound those little drivers will put out with the high pass engaged. Even without xo they do very well for their size but with the xo the SPLs you can achieve are absolutely amazing. I did re-build my EL34 SET and with the new configuration it's a good bit better than the Crown, but it's still not night and day... the Crown is pretty amazing for a couple hundred bucks!You will want to order Pomona tellurium copper binding posts though, they bolt-in without soldering and make a big improvement in terms of added grain. The Crown is not perfect in this area and it's mostly the connectors/jacks doing the damage.
I have the Super 3 XRS, I run them with a 10" sub. You can get the Pomona posts at Mouser or any large electronics seller, they are very common. Get the tellurium copper ones with gold plating...
I will have the Super 3XRS's with built in 8 inch subs. Are they easy to swap out?
Do the 8" subs get the signal from the amp or are there RCA/XLR inputs? If the 8" subs get their signal from the amp then a high pass crossover would not work out very well... The Pomona posts are very easy to swap out. Looks like the price has gone up, before they were $1 less each...
Of course, it's bypass-able. I'd guess the plate amp that drives the 8" subs can take either input but since it's integrated into the speaker it's worth checking. It's likely that jumpers from the binding posts to the plate amp are required but it's probably also possible to use RCA or XLR inputs from a preamp, that would be the only way high-passing the amp would work out, otherwise it'll high-pass the sub too, which is sort of counterproductive.
Another amp I've had good success with is the UK built (2005) Creek A50i with MOSFET outputs. I know where there is a stash of them new in the box. These amps are classics by any sense of the word.My 2 cents CAD worth (1.27 USD)
