GriffinFL

Living in FL and running tube pre and power amps into my Belles, you're scaring me. Define "Heat" in this situation. What level of "heat" starts doing actual damage to the tubes (or other components, for that matter)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

Yup. Getting ready to pull the trigger on a custom pair of speaker wires for my rig (forks for the Belles, spades for the Quicksilver binding posts) from BJC to never have to worry about it again. Soldering and crimping your own ends sucks if you're not an EE, and trying to strap your own damn bare wire to the terminal screws is not fun.

I bought tubes because they sound way better than SS with my speakers. I was never drawn to the tinkering factor, just the sound. Same reason I bought the speakers in the first place.

I just bought a pair last month. You're going to enjoy them. With a standard hifi preamp (2v out), my Belles can still get so loud it's hard to be in the same room with them, but it's still crystal clear. I couldn't help it, though. I ordered a Xiang Sheng 802b to see what they sound like with a pre that is up to the task of delivering the 9v input gain. Just to see what the outer limits are. Maybe open up my sliders and have a block party when it gets here

I just snuck it on there after someone pulled a jazz record. Cleared the room halfway through "I Come From Nowhere"... Well, me and one other guy who was also a Zappa fan were standing there laughing.

I forced everyone at the hotel to listen to the (deliberately) worst-engineered platter ever in Frank Zappa's Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. On a pair of Cornwalls...

Anything with big soundscapes. Lately I've been spinning Dave Gilmour live at Pompeii 2016 a lot. But I love some Devin Townsend, particularly live performances. Early Dream Theater, before they started self-producing. Also, whoever said men can't sing anymore is full of it. Not looking hard enough, man.

Lots of resources out there for DIY, for example: http://sonicscoop.com/2016/11/10/diy-studio-design-part-2-build-cost-effective-bass-traps/ Functionally you're just rounding off the corner with a floor to ceiling rigid panel, typically OC 703.

Corner bass traps would probably be cheaper and more effective, just saying. The subs will still suffer when your room has standing waves like that, because the frequencies are self-cancelling, no matter how much energy you add to them.

My system, still evolving: Belle Klipsch (mid-80's, bone stock) Quicksilver Audio monoblocks (hiding up top, with Hammond cages on top) Denon HEOS Link (doing double duty as DAC and Pre right now, but a XiangSheng 728A is in route to gain-match with the QS's) My wife actually loves the look of the speakers, but she hates the look of all the gear involved in powering them. But once I got the tubes fired up (replaced a Sony stereo amp), she smiled and hi-fived me. "I had no idea how these speakers were going to sound better, but they sound better now!" was her reaction.

B&O may be overpriced, but they don't lie about their performance. That's why Bo$e gets way more abuse. Bottom line. If Amar didn't lie about his shitty products, he wouldn't get hammered the way he does by anyone who knows anything about audio.

Seriously, the angling of walls is not nonsense. The fewer parallel surfaces in your room, the fewer standing waves you'll deal with, and the less effort you'll have to invest in acoustic treatments. I've been in professional recording studios where the control room had seven walls, and the cathedral ceiling was angled. My listening space right now has a ton of advantages, especially regarding bass nulls, because it's an L-shape with a ton of outcroppings. I can stand anywhere in the space and the bass response does not change, and that's HUGE.

Do you think it's possible that this is an artifact from the COVID pandemic? That people are spending more money on home entertainment as a category because they're avoiding traditional social entertainment like bars, clubs, concerts, et al?

Solved.

PS: I bought tubes for my Belles because of the clarity, especially at low volume. Not for the distortion, which is why guitarists buy tube amps.

Nah. Wealthy guitarists love old tube amps because there's a prestige component to owning them. My rehearsal rig features a very modern tube amp, but when I record, it's all digital modeling, because I can tweak settings after the fact. My point was that I very well know the difference between tube distortion and MOSFET distortion. Pro tip: I use both in my live rig. So does nearly every other guitarist who doesn't rely completely on digital modeling systems.

As a guitarist, I promise you don't have to explain to me the difference between MOSFET distortion and tube distortion.

Here to tell you that low-watt tubes produce less distortion than hi-watt SS. The Sony stereo receiver (100wpc) I used to power my Belles gets scattered, distorted, and generally unlistenable in the 5-10% range. Swapping out for a pair of Quicksilver 25wpc monoblocks changed everything. Even at ultra-low-power, the output was laser-focused, like the volume level was really just how far away I was from the place where the actual live music was happening.

OK, so I ended up going with a Denon HEOS Link ($300) as a DAC, but it's also going to serve as a pre-amp for at least a few months for the Quicksilver Horn Mono pair ($1500) that just came in today. I went over budget, but I feel pretty comfortable with the investment. Definitely will be taking my time looking at preamp options before I make a commitment, but I'm already pleased with the improvement from the cheap Sony to these monoblocks. In fact, I'm feeling like I'm at a point right now where I'd spend to swap out the crossovers before I'd worry about upgrading the pre over the very clean gain the Denon gives me.

Okay, so I've had the chance to get acquainted with these badboys, but my situation has also changed a bit. Turns out the Sony Bravia we just bought, as much as we're happy with the picture, it can't sync via bluetooth with the receiver (odd, didn't Sony used to be ALL ABOUT all their components working together perfectly?) and its only audio output is optical. A couple of hours of cursory googling (also searching this forum) has me thinking that the Dared MP-5BT might be a good choice, not only as an initial shift to tubes, but also to serve later down the line as a preamp for what I figured would be the final stop, which would be a pair of monoblocks. The Dared amps seem to be well-received around here, and the MP-5BT gives me all the connectivity I need for our lifestyle, plus the preamp outs that would make it a keeper as a front end later down the line. (edit) Ah crap, I just realized it does NOT have optical input, though it does have a USB in specifically for a DAC, which I'm not even sure I want to go that far.

Well, that was the sell point of the starved-plate systems - extremely low price point compared to their properly powered high-end peers.

There's definitely a ceiling, being that those are just preamp tubes, and the power stage is SS. I don't know that I'd invest that much effort in tube rolling in this situation.

My instant reflex on the hybrids (when I first saw them) was "gimmick". Cheap SS amp with a couple of tubes in the pre so they could claim it was a "tube" amp reminds me of how starved-plate "tube" circuits hit the market in the pro audio circuit back in the mid-aughts, claiming to offer "tube" sound at an affordable price, when all they were offering was the hairy distortion part (of an overdriven tube) without any of the clean detail of a properly (not over) driven tube. Marketing scam, especially at that price point. FWIW, though, I looked at that unit (and a few others in the sub-$300 range) before I finally decided to post here and have a real discussion about tubes in the sub-$1k range and what I could reasonably expect from them.

Technical observation: I do think the dampening curtains I ordered (due in Thursday) will help immensely, because I suspect there's some HF comb filtering going on here in the current space. There's a definite lack of "air" range in the listening room that one can actually hear directly outside the room through the glass sliders. Because the room is not square/rectangular (more of an L shape with various outcroppings and odd corners), I'm not having similar null issues in the bass range, which makes me think bass traps will be unnecessary in here.