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In Reply to: RE: Great speakers! posted by Lew on August 07, 2015 at 06:43:19
I sold my Pro-Ac speakers immediately prior to buying the DeCapos. They are very different sounding although both very musical. I would often listen to either pair of speakers for 8+ hours any weekend day without risk of listener fatigue.
The ProAcs however require a _lot_ of power to go low and although I also have an Hsu sub in the system, the "integration" was never quite what I hoped. So I sold the ProAcs and bought the DeCapos.
Anyway, both are great speakers and I could live happily ever after with either.
what speakers are you using now?
ken
Follow Ups:
I use Sound Lab ESLs with my Atma-sphere amplifiers, but I am only happy after major modifications to the Sound Lab crossover network that resulted in increasing the impedance by quite a bit and increasing efficiency, likewise.
What kind of Soundlab requires a crossover? I thought they were full-range like my Acoustats were.
Interestingly, I demoed my Ref 3as with a Graaf GM20 OTL...fantastic. I use SET amps at home for the moment but I might try a transcendent SE OTL. (their new ones are 4 watts stereo and 12 watts mono).
Actually, many Acoustats have a crossover used in exactly the same way as is the one used in the full-range Sound Lab speakers: Inside the "backplate" you will find two audio step-up transformers, one for the bass and one for the treble. There is a first-order crossover network that divides the incoming frequencies to feed the two transformers. Sound Lab actually copied this approach from Acoustat. In the SL speakers, the low pass filter is an inductor, in series with the input and the primary of the bass transformer. The hi-pass filter is an RC network, with C in series and R in parallel with the primaries of the treble transformer. On the secondary side, the two transformers are tied together and do drive the panel as if it were a one-way speaker. Very small value capacitors are used in series to isolate the secondaries of the treble transformer from those of the bass transformer.
That is true for the older 1+1 and 2+2 etc. The spectras did something different and had a High voltage crossover that was using resistors and the native panel capacitance as near as I could tell. Two transformers but of equal size...not like the 1+1s I had. In all I had three pairs of Acoustats (1+1, Spectra 2200 and Spectra 4400)...all at the same time! The 2200s were the best sounding overall...very transparent but full sound. The 1+1 were a bit leaner but slightly more opaque sounding and the 4400s were for some reason I could never figure out slightly dark and a bit muffled sounding...made amazing subwoofers though, which is ultimately how I used them.
By this do you mean that the filtering was done after the secondaries of the step-up? Yes, I see how that could be done with the proper very high voltage rated resistors, in theory.
And I use Stax F83's with Futterman OTL3's. These speakers are incredibly inefficient, but they have a very high impedance in the midrange (160 ohms). Strangely for ELS's, the impedance drops to about 4 ohms at low frequencies as well as high, and the amps struggled with bass. Adding a pair of subwoofers helped enormously, and I now get plenty of dynamics as well as greatness sweetness in midrange and treble.
The speakers are pretty much unavailable now, unfortunately.
F83s are great! I had F81s and wish I had kept them...so transparent. We drove them best with a big Push/pull EL34 based amp but I can imagine an OTL being just jaw dropping with them.
Have you seen the company in Holland that makes a Electrostatic direct drive amp that will also work with STAX speakers?
http://twinstaticaudio.com/elektronica/twin-otl/
monoblocks with 4600V swing.
Thanks very much. I am indeed very happy with the sound of my OTL-STAX combo.
I have a letter from Harvey Rosenberg himself saying it was an ideal combination; for a while he was thinking of marketing a special amplifier to go with these speakers. I think Roger Modjeski is also offering a direct drive option for this and several other ESL;s. I'm happy as is, however.
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