Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site


In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Cool running AB amplifier.. with good sound.
Post Subject: Good sounding SS amplifier for horns?Posted by Romy the Cat on: 8/4/2006

Chris, I have no experience with good sounding SS amplifier that might drive high sensitive horns. I also have no expertise to build such an amp. From what I trued before I have learned that in order to sound more or less acceptable the SS should run a pure class A. Well, a few watts class AA SS should not be a big deal to make, well theoretically….  An idea of heaving a SS single ended amp for 10W is not bad idea as well, but who build them and who can assess how thy sound while they build them?  To deal with the Pass’ “First Watt”- level people and to be satisfied with the amplifiers that make the single driver speakers to sound like “live music”. Thank you, I have heard a lot of Pass amps and a lot of Lowther speakers….

I kind of keep thinking about it for a whale and my first step into the direction that you propose will be the new version of Zarathustra.  Dima has been running the out stage and it currently despites 300W deep into class A; he also claims that is proprietary bias (working name is Newton bias, it is no joke, there is a reasons for this name) allows him to get exactly 50% efficiency… The amps is PP but it sounds very different then SS that I heard, at least the AB version was and I did not hear the Zarathustra Class A version yet.  Now is the interesting part. There is a lot of very kinky solutions in the new Zarathustra and one of them is an ability to run this amp as 150W and … as I would say 10W in class A, presumably with no compromise to sound (wish us good luck). I do not mean that the amp will be switching into class B after 10W but it will all together dissipate juts 20W by it’s output stage and never will find itself switching into class B. (we drop both current and voltage). So, when I get Zarathustra I will try to run it in 20W mode for instance and to see if it able to do anything worthy with horns…

The idea to have a separate low power SS and biamp it with a powerfully SS for bass is wonderful but I would like if I wish to flip a switch and to turn the “big” system on, driving the Macondo with what it should be driven with. If I have a small parallel system (SS+ SL600 and sub for instance) then it is easy to do. I defiantly DO NOT want to disconnect 4(5) cables form Macondo and connect them to something else. Not to mention that the Dominus cables do not sound good for a few days after they were disturbed…

Still your idea give some food for thoughts….

Rgs,
Romy the caT

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site