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RE: FWIW

Posted by morricab on May 26, 2014 at 02:16:33:
Yes, I know your amp gives predominantly 3rd harmonic as it is push/pull that cancels out even harmonics. Nature tends to have monotonic harmonic decay (2nd bigger than 3rd bigger than 4th etc.) unless it is completely anharmonic (like a cymbal crash). This is what Jean Hiraga was going on about 30 years ago and Cheever much more recently that the PATTERN has to be monotonic and in line with ear/brain distortion mechanisms (aural harmonics as Cheever puts it I think). A push/pull amp cannot do this correctly...by design.

Your OTLs do not sound overly lean, IMO, but I can see where that comment could come from. THe OTLs I had were incredibly transparent and powerful sounding but not as fluid and coherent as I get from SET. No OTL I have heard does that even as they are doing some things far better than all but the best SETs. For correct tonality I have to give the nod to really good SETs...those that don't have significant issues with their output transformers.

"IMO if you really want to hear what an SET does, it should be on a speaker that is efficient enough that the amp never goes above about 20% of full power."

This is probably true of any amplifier that is not using any negative feedback as the distortion is rising with increasing power. An amp with heavy negative feedback almost has to be played hard just to "wake up" a bit. I don't think it is a SET or PP thing, more of a feedback or not thing.

"This makes them very similar to the sound of our amps, except that we have more bandwidth and power"

Well, my NAT makes 100 watts of SE(T) power so it is right up there with your MA-1 in terms of speaker compatibility...probably better because of the damping factor. Bass is superb, deep tight and yet natural in a way that feedback bass is not.

I have no doubt that the S30 is a price/performance champ, but if you have the budget for better then it and the M60s do have competition from both the SET and hybrid worlds.

Again, make a 10-20 watt SEOTL and you will have a customer ;-).

If I get the really high sensitivity horns I am looking into I will probably be trying one the Transcendent Sound SEOTL models