I'd like people who are doing this to give me thier opinion on how the sound is at various volume levels. I'm thinking of trying this with my Vmps RM 40's but am concerned that running two different brands of amplifier will have different sonic characteristics and possibly not stay aligned with one another at different volume levels.
Warner,
The only thing that doesn't stay aligned is your wallet.
If you set it up right, you get the best of both ss slam and tube magic. I don't hear any drop off at high volume and I can listen as softly as I want. At one of the meets, we had my 40s rocking at 105 db for a few songs and only thing rattling was my Scotch bottles next to the subs.
ESL amp should drive the woofers on the 40s real tight. I put in a CJ SS after I pulled the Innersound amp (to drive my Soundlabs). It wasn't good -- I ended up getting a pair of eAR 1001s to do the woofer duty. Now it's good. Nuforce should be good too since it has such high damping factor.
I tried passive biamping first but gave up after having to use an attenuator on my ARC VT100. By the time I got the levels matched, all the magic on the tubes were choked up.
In came the activecross over and fun with all kinds of amps and interconnects. You don't need all that. RM 40s have complete passive filters on the ribbons. You can run the ribbons straight out of your preamp output. All you need is a low pass filter on your woofers. I would get a subwoofer crossover (must be able to to up to 280 Hz) with room eq capability. With CDWG the total output of ribbons is reduced and actually helps in leveling the field with the woofer output. All you have to do to go active biamping is to desolder and disconnect one end of the inductor in your 40s. I have run 28W, 40W, 100W, 125W and 200W tubes on the ribbons to sucessful outcome. I am currently "stuck" on a 125W triode magic.
