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I disagree with your assessment

What you are saying is all nice but not really true. THe LAMM has more than enough current grunt to drive Apogee Scintillas so the Thiel is not really a huge challenge. Your explanation for "lack of life" also doesn't hold water because one of the very best sounding amps we have heard on the Thiels was the VAC 30/30, which I am sure would not meet your definition of sufficient drive for the Thiel. Also, my friend's standard amps, Octave MRE 280 monoblocks, would also not deliver the same amount of current as the LAMMs into the Thiels more diffcult load and yet it sounds significantly better.

Also, up until clipping the KR VA350i also drove the Thiels beautifully.

Given that the LAMMs in this case were purchased SPECIFICALLY to drive 1 ohm Scintillas and do so without complaint and without clipping in a largish room to highish volumes (when set to the 1-6 ohm setting) I am not quite sure how you arrived at the conclusion (they make 230watts into 2 ohms...hardly wimpy). Given that the Thiel is 90db or so per watt it doesn't take a lot of power to get pretty loud. If 230 watts into 2 ohms, which in my book is indication of sufficient current from this amp, is not sufficient to drive a 90+db speaker to loud levels in a moderate sized room then please educate me with some math on how much power I should need??

Nevermind I will do it for you.

Let's say the Thiel is 90db watt but it is 4 ohm so it takes actually 2 watts to reach that volume. Now add a second speaker and give us 3db more for that and then subtract about 3 db for losses to the listening position (it is less than the square of the distance because of reflections) and we get 90db for 2 watts at the listenign position of about 3 to 3.5 meters away (already pretty loud).

90db 2 watts
93db 4 watts
96db 8 watts
99db 16 watts
102db 32 watts
105db 64 watts
108db 128 watts

So, we see that we should be able to get well over 100db at the listening position from this amp...too loud to listen to for a long time. Even with compression setting in we would be well over 100db with the power available. Also, give that the power, while not doubling into 2 ohms, is still 230 watts, indicating plenty of current drive from the amp.

As for the other Apogees we were using, the Studio Grand is a nice and easy 5 ohm load with about 87db/watt sensitivity and the Centaur Major is something similar. You can tell me that an amp of the LAMMs capabilities cannot drive these speakers successfully?? You must be joking I think. We have driven them with a number of tube amps as well as lesser SS amps (and more beastly ones too) and never encountered an amp that "could not drive" these more modest load Apogees.

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