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Experiment failed, and what I ended up doing...


Deang

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About a month ago I posted that I was buying an Anthem AMP1 45 watt tube to mate with my RC7's. I had commented that if I didn't like the bass I would take advantage of the RC7's biwirable crossover and just biamp instead - putting the AMP1 on the horns and my Luxman 200 wpc SS amp on the woofers.

The experiment failed miserably. In fact - it sounded pretty bad. I'm not even going to waste keystrokes trying to describe the sound - but trust me - it don't work.

So - I just put the Anthem 'tubey' with the RC7's and left it that way - giving my ears a chance to get used to it. I tried running it with my Boston PV1000 sub and ended up liking the sound better without it. This kind of surprised me.

Well, Now I had this extra amp I wasn't using, and a sub that was just sitting there. I had recently upgraded my DVD player to a Marantz DV7010 and got thinking that I was really only a preamp and speakers away from another decent system.

While I was shopping for a preamp on AudioGon. Earle Decker decided to sell his B&K 4420 - and always wanting a good MOSFET amp - I gobbled it up. I got lucky and found another Anthem Pre1L and scooped it up.

That left getting the speakers and I was just about out of money. What to buy? I decided on a set of SB2's to mate with the PV1000 and B&K.

After trying every different combination possible I ended up doing the following:

We live in a Cape Cod and so the whole upstairs serves as our bedroom - below is the system I built upstairs:

Klipsch RC7's

Anthem AMP1

Anthem Pre1L

Anthem CD1

Toshiba DVD Player

27" Mitsubishi

Downstairs system:

Klipsch SB2's

PV1000 Subwoofer

B&K 4420

Anthem Pre1L

Marantz DV7010

32" Toshiba

I will probably upgrade those SB2's to a set of RB5's before January.

What I think is that tubes sound magical. I don't have the lower end control that the B&K or even my Luxman gave me - but I don't care. The lows are good enough and the mids and sparkling highs make up for it in spades. I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about the 'rolled off highs of tube amps'.

The downstairs system is primarily for HT now - though the SB2's sound surprisingly good hooked up to that B&K 4420. It's a nice dark, rich sound.

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deanG

This message has been edited by deang on 11-12-2001 at 12:07 AM

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