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Solid State amps known to sound good with Klipsch


mark1101

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My present go to ss amp is a trusty ATI AT602.  It provides pretty much textbook performance for a modern ss class ab amp, great specs, solid into low impedance loads, input sensitivity/gain controls (an essential feature when using high sensitivity speakers IMO), and 12v trigger.  It's my "keep me honest" amp when not messing with tubes.  It just amplifies, adds nothing, get's out of the way of the music.  

 

 

You beat me to it.  ATI sounds great with Klipsch.  Great bottom end as they'll put out gobs of current.  Crystal clear on the top end and very quiet when they're supposed to be.

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I have been dying to try a pass amplifier...

I to would love to try either Passlabs, or First Watt.

Exactly...

Truth been known, I am extremely happy with the bel canto class d's I run currently. I wish some of you could hear just how good these sound in combination with what else is going on in my current system. Good recordings are very tactile and fluid, bad recordings are barely listenable.

B&O Ice Power class D amps sound great with big horns as well. I would however love to hear the Bel Canto some time on my system.

In the vintage world Yamaha and Harman Kardon work well. I picked up a vintage HK 630 a couple of years ago and was surprised how good it sounded with K-horns. It lives in my bedroom now driving a pair of AR 11.

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The MC-250 and MC-2100 can be bridged to run in mono at much higher power.  Right now I am using 2 MC-2100s bridged at 210 wpc each.  Still sounds very good bridged too.

 

Honestly, between the two I think the 250s sound a little sweeter than the 2100s...........but it's close.

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+1 for the old HK twin powered receivers.  I have the 730 and two 430's.....can't be beat for the money!  The 730 powered LS's for awhile....just amazing.  Now, the 730 is hooked up to Forte II's....hard to believe such a small wattage amp can deliver that much clean power.  One of my 430's is running some KG 2.5's...very sweet as well.

 

Hogfan

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Since the amp everyone has in their system is the best thing since sliced bread, which it usually is, we might as well talk about what amps they didn't like or sold because of it.

 

Righto!   I'd like to know what sounds bad with klipsch...

 

 

WHOA!  I'm a newbie again :o

Edited by mmfant
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I like Sunfire power, Parasound, the newer, Mosfet Adcoms like the 5800. I'd probably still be running the Adcom if it didn't raise the room temp by 10+ degrees. The original Acurus 200x3 sounds really nice, didn't care much for the A150 I had though. Some of the Carvers sound great like the M-1.5t and the Silver 7t & 9t's.

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Since the amp everyone has in their system is the best thing since sliced bread, which it usually is, we might as well talk about what amps they didn't like or sold because of it.

 

There is some truth to this approach.  Perhaps the best way to extract hard value from this conversation is to identify the "losers".  I know that I've heard many poor amplifiers - the poorest being non-solid state, unfortunately.  But I'd put many "cheap" amplifiers into this bucket - like the class-D "HT in a box" amps and many of SS amps from the mid-1960s to perhaps the early 1980s.  Some of those were terrible to listen to. The following is from Lynn Olson:

 

 

...the power amps of the late Sixties and early Seventies blew up a lot and sounded pretty nasty. We're not talking classics here, we're talking about junk that should never have been put on the market. The engineers of the early Seventies were still wrestling with problems like maintaining adequate phase margin with real loudspeaker loads, Nyquist feedback stability criteria, staying within the Safe Operating Area for the driver and output stage, and little things like that...loads of feedback, and very low THD distortion measurements. (0.03%, get it?) [They] measured just fine, but [they weren't] too reliable in the real world, with an alarming fondness for shorting out driver transistors, smoking bias resistors, and shooting flames out of the cooling vents (in anticipation of the much larger solid-state melt-down at Three Mile Island).

 

I remember many days when more of these dogs came back for repair than...shipped out. Some of the amps had circuit boards scorched beyond recognition, and top plates discolored by lines of light-gray soot. We'd replace the circuit board, repaint the top cover, and ship 'em right back out again as "new" product. (Refurbished? What's that? You mean this new amp right here?)...The only consolation was knowing that all the rest of the high-powered transistor amps were just as bad. (We tested our competition on the bench and they blew up too.)

 

In the mid-Seventies, along came...the discovery of TIM (slewing) distortion. Our Number One engineer (the conservative old-timer...) was utterly horrified by Otala's first Audio Engineering Society paper and said it was unscientific bunk (well, his language was stronger than that). Our young Number Two engineer took Matti seriously, let "traditional values" go by the board, and tried a different approach.

 

[That engineer] let the distortion rise up to the 0.1% level by making very large decreases in feedback (feedback dropped from 40-50 dB to 20 dB) and using the most linear complementary-symmetry topology possible. The slew rate and power bandwidth improved by a factor of 10 to 50 times. Best of all, we couldn't break it, even with my speaker simulator load hooked up.

 

In 1976, [one firm] introduced...the first low-TIM amplifier sold in the US. Sure enough, it sounded much better than [its predecessors], and the failure rate in the field was well under 1%. The reason for both was probably the 200 kHz power bandwidth and an excess phase margin of 60 degrees, both quite unusual at the time...Matti's paper had such a profound impact on the solid-state design community that nearly all high-end engineers got on board...besides, it's hard to argue with better reliability, which a high slew rate and adequate phase margin certainly provide. Everyone loves reliability.

 

Chris

Edited by Chris A
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Since the amp everyone has in their system is the best thing since sliced bread, which it usually is, we might as well talk about what amps they didn't like or sold because of it.

Sony ES series amps, Adcom gear. I had both when I first bought K-horns. The combination just about made my ears bleed.

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For my two cents......

I run a couple older Adcoms 555II's.... I power my LaScala's with one of them. I also use one of them for my Heresy's.

My favorite amps with my Klipsch are the bigger Carver's....I love the way they can get my Chorus pumping. My TFM-55x will bring out more bottom end than both my Adcom's bridged.

I also like my little Carver cubes...M400t's....they have a great sound to them.... imho...they run cool and put out a lot of good sound from alittle 7" cube....

I'm always swaping things around....just playing with my gear.....

My only system that does not change is my shop system....Carver TFM-42 drives my KP-362's.... yea that Carver will get those 362's pumping for sure.....but even at a moderate listening level....maybe 10 watts or so ....it just has good sound....

The only amp I have not cared for a whole lot was a Adcom 545 I got a few years back....not that it sounded "bad" it just ran out of steam quick....so it was offed quick....

So in the nutshell I really like my Carver's....would love to check out some Silver 7t's or 9t's...one day..

Oh and I do play with a old Crown 1010....not a bad sounding amp.....

MKP :-)

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any older 70's jap amps - yamaha mostly - absoluty awesome

Could we please refrain from the "jap" references?

 

 

I'm surprised that got past the censors. 

 

Also, Randyh, do you mean awesome in the good sense, or the bad sense?  Are they good sounding, or are they scary (in the bad sense)

Edited by garyrc
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any older 70's jap amps - yamaha mostly - absoluty awesome

Could we please refrain from the "jap" references?

 

 

I'm surprised that got past the censors. 

 

Also, Randyh, do you mean awesome in the good sense, or the bad sense?  Are they good sounding, or are they scary (in the bad sense)

 

 

 

Funny thing is I have not heard that term but a couple of times in the last few decades.  I thought it was dead.  Though I may have heard it on a History Channel WWII documentary from former American POWs.

 

Bill

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Chris, or any of the others versed in the electrical engineering and ss class a amps. Have any of you used, tried, or have familiarity with Peter Walker's current dumping type amps?  Quad 402 and some follow up models employ this approach, and I think one of Pass' old Threshold amps does as well.  Supposedly class a operation (total absence of crossover distortion), but with low heat, low output impedance, big power, and low parts count.  They've been around forever, and, on paper at least, seem rather ingenious.  

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