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RE: Bass control with low powered tube amps

Personal experience with my Forte I speakers. I had a Primaluna Prologue power amp rated at 35 wpc. Tube selection I had to improve the sound may have pushed that down a fair amount. It sounded OK to me at the time, but my wife did comment on the lack of bass - I just thought it was 'clean'. I wanted to hear SET, and stumbled into an opportunity to build a 50 wpc SET amp. The bass difference is night and day from the Primaluna. In retrospect there was little bass - whatever power the Primaluna was putting out was inadequate, or maybe crappy caps rolled off the bass. If it was just the caps, then perhaps a lower powered amp would be ok with the Forte.

My guess is that the big woofer is going to demand a bit of drive, more than the squawker and tweeter, and that is where performance will suffer with a lower powered amp. I cannot recommend SET enough - it is lovely, and well worth experiencing. I would not go back to push-pull. If you read the SET posts, the ongoing issue with SETs is lack of power. There is sort of an ongoing focus on first watt, and a trend to low level listening. It is a tradeoff for the experience, and generally the tradeoff is wonderful mids and highs and somewhat deficient bass. There are tradeoffs in almost everything.

My experience - others may well disagree.

regards -- Roger


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  • RE: Bass control with low powered tube amps - rogerh113 08:00:53 10/24/16 (0)

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