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In Reply to: Poll: would a store totally devoted to S.E.T. work? posted by MKG on February 25, 2007 at 11:08:30:
Madonna and Ronny Milsap have a vacuum tube operated studio they record in at times and I read this 3 years ago so I have to find the article but those two were mentioned and of course you have a lot of blues that is done today and many blues singers idolize eric clapton and Jimi Hendrix which are avid tube aficianados and even tho Hendrix is long gone,his legend lives on and on.
When you look at all the new tube amps comming on the market the audio magazines,not to mention the ones comming from the far east,you cant help but take notice.
If you go back to the mid 70s to late 80s,most of your high end speakers were VERY inefficient..What was happening is there was a price to power war of manufacturers going on between the dyna st400 and the phase linear 400 and the gas ampzilla and the pioneer spec two and many others and the only way the speakers could handle the high power was to make a complicated network that absorbed a lot of the power but it also made the speakers sound bland..The IMF TLS series and the Kefs were good examples of this and they finally had started making heavier duty drivers and simplifying the networks to respond well to the 1 watt range of the amp..The IMF pro 4s I used to have were 40 watts in to get 96 dbs out..That was insane and people started pulling out old vintage altec speakers and JBLs and voice of theatre and putting them on 8 watt set amps making people creme their pants and the big elite manufacturers realized this and now I can take a new pair of martin logan electrostats and play them to nice levels on a 10 watt set amp.Twenty years ago they would have laughed in your face if you made that statement.
So yes I think the tube market will grow more and more and you can see this by the evidence of new tubes comming out each year..They have to be selling somewhere and now there is going to be a 5 channel tube amp for video for 3 grand.
Follow Ups:
What was happening is there was a price to power war of manufacturers going on between the dyna st400 and the phase linear 400 and the gas ampzilla and the pioneer spec two and many others and the only way the speakers could handle the high power was to make a complicated network that absorbed a lot of the power but it also made the speakers sound bland.That does not sound correct to me. The initial push came from the introduction of smaller amd more domestic friendly speakers like the AR, which required much more power than bigger and more efficient speakers of the day. So the amp manufacturers followed suit.
I agree that this led to "a price to power war", although I'm skeptical that speaker manufacturers created speakers with very complicated crossovers or very inefficient designs in order to "soak up" the power so it could be used with the amps mentioned.
Rather I think the "cheap" power the big amps were producing enabled the speaker manufacturers to explore designs (like the transmission line) that they would have otherwise passed by.
Regards,
Geoff
Geoff
They most certainly did deign the networks to be able to handle the high power from the amps..I have the original B-139 kef woofer that IMf used and it was good for maybe 25 to 30 watts.The big amps that were 200wpc and more are the amps that were sold with those type speakers and of course people would crank the SHI- out of them..They were blowing mids and tweeters and woofers left and right and they were melting the cones to the speaker frames at times.
John Hayes which was IMFs owner said we need to have new drivers that can handle power and thats when they started using things like ferrofluid drivers and woofers which had heavier voice coils with Kef redesigning the B139..
If you look at the imf pro monitor 4 speakers,they have 4 drivers and twice as many parts in the network as the monitor 7 which is the same speaker with the newer drivers.
So yes they did make major changes and the efficiency tells a lot..Im not saying every speaker did,but many of the speakers sold in the 70s were too desirable unless they were maggies or acoustats or maybe the infinity servos or some JBLS..Even klipsh got better finally.
I'm surprised that the manufacturers followed the trend that way. You appear to be saying that IMF recognized the sales of those big amps were defining a market they wanted to be in - so designed a speaker that could not be easily damaged by them. Interesting. I sure remember those big IMFs back then - man, that was a long time ago.
Regards,
Geoff
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