Thanks for sharing your opinion Bonzo. If anyone reads it, it will discourage them from buying these old products and driving up the prices. Some of us will then benefit. I appreciate it.
Natural Sound
- Thread starter PeterA
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Thanks for sharing your opinion Bonzo. If anyone reads it, it will discourage them from buying these old products and driving up the prices. Some of us will then benefit. I appreciate it.
Just to give you a perspective, if you had a set of our M-60, which make 80 Watts into 16 Ohms, at 2 Watts you'd have trouble measuring the distortion. You can hear that in the same way you can tell the difference between a cheap violin and a Strat- by the difference in harmonic structure. Add harmonics and it changes the sound. Literally the harmonics of SETs is the attraction, but IMO (I use LPs I recorded myself for reference) they are far too rich so its easier to characterize them as musical instruments rather than musical reproducers.
The other issue with SETs is they can't play bass because the cut core of the output transformer has too little inductance. So it becomes very hard for the tube to make bass. By comparison a PP amp can go one or 2 octaves lower with full power and our amps are flat to 2Hz (so no phase shift at all at 20Hz).
I like the sound of SETs, but they aren't convincing when it comes to sounding real.
Ralph, I actually like the quality the base in my current system very much. So I disagree with your generalization that SET’s can’t play bass. Madfloyd,, a bass musician, shared his impressions of the sound of the bass in my system on page 2 or 3 of this very thread. He seems to also disagree with you about SETs not being able to do bass.
I heard your amps at a couple of shows. Perhaps your class D amps have even lower distortion. I wish you every success.
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PP can give more bass than sets for sure, that is audio 101. Does that mean you will use a Krell over PP. that also does more bass. You just need better speakers then
I think you know by now that I’m not really into panel speakers and I like more efficient designs. The hybrid M1 .1 sounded excellent on my Magico system. And this L1, hybrid preamp sounds excellent in my current system. I am very happy with it. Have you ever heard it?
I bought an extra preamp and phono stage below the Lamm reference level to have fun with hearing differences and maybe assembling a second system one day. They are also less expensive. I did buy a second copy of the same amps to have as spares, for a second system, or possibly if I ever decide to an a lot experiment with subwoofers in a different room. In this case, I want them to be the same model amp. That’s not the case with the preamp and the phone stage, so no multiple copies as you suggest.
Perhaps one day you will add videos and comments about Ron’s Pendragon versus Clarisys to your travel blog.
I have nothing against SS preamps. I don’t know the Lamm hybrid preamp, I was referring to the hybrid amp
That’s what I suspected. This discussion started out being about the sound of my new L1 hybrid preamp until someone turned it into an amplifier discussion. I do not know if Ralph has heard or measured it either.
Most of the time you are using mW, so distortion will be suitably low and of low order. Ralph is wrong that 3rd in isolation sweetens things a bit. The lower the order the more benign the effect…no harmonic is lower than 2nd and it is necessary for masking higher orders…Lamm understood and follows that pattern quite well with the ML2…Ralph’s OTLs and class D amps don’t follow this pattern….a pattern determined by Jean Hiraga to have ideal sound characteristics. Cheever came up with the same pattern. As long as the distortion follows the same pattern as the ear/brains own distortion it will be masked…this means it is also SPL dependent. This is one reasonwhy sensitivity matters. The amp can stay longer in the ideal range.
I agree Peter. I thought those amps, along with whatever Lamm preamp you were listening to at the time, gave the best sound of the various models I've heard in your Magico system over the years.
Thanks!
This seems like one of those things you have to hear to really appreciate. The deeper your speakers go, the easier this is to hear.
I've played string bass since 6th grade and still do (as well as keyboards) today. Low E on a bass is only 40Hz. There's a whole nuther octave below that and some pipe organs can do 16 Hz. SETs simply can't play that stuff with any power (the type 45 power tube does it best but you can really only hear what it does on headphones since its power is so low).
If you have a gapped output transformer (and most SETs do) there is never enough inductance to play bass properly (let alone damping). The load line turns into an ellipse in the presence of low bass. The lower portion of that ellipse is not where you want to operate a tube. To prevent saturation of the OPT, most SET designers will cut off the lows earlier in the circuit so the mids and highs will be cleaner. This introduces phase shift in the bass region (since the cutoff is usually a 6dB slope) which extends to 10X the cutoff frequency. The ear perceives this as a lack of impact despite the frequency being in-band. That's why we extend our OTL amps down to 2Hz.
The other thing you might want to consider is what happens when you have a PP amp of the same class of operation and output power is the sacred SET. Such tube amps are hard to find! But if you do find one and its built properly you'll find it does not take a back seat to SETs in any way that audiophiles value.
Put another way, when SET lovers compare PP to SET, the playing field is never level. If you really want to hear what PP does, make that amp using the same tube complement as the SET with similar build quality. A 7 Watt 300b becomes 35 Watts. Topology is important too: as Norman Crowhurst (the tube guru of the late 1950s) points out, if you put a single-ended front end on a PP amp, thru algebraic summing you wind up with a 5th harmonic that's not masked very well by the 2nd and 3rd. My surmise is most of the PP amps compared to SETs have this problem.
So more about that: SETs express a quadratic non-linearity, which results in a dominant 2nd harmonic. If the amp if fully differential and balanced, a cubic non-linearity is expressed. The cubic non-linearity is inherently lower distortion. But if you combine the two, the 5th shows up stronger and I've no doubt that's why SET lovers disdain PP amps, not realizing the problem isn't PP but topology.
So the kind of PP amp you really want to hear is one that does not combine SE with PP but instead is entirely balanced and differential from input to output.
Ralph, I am reminded of Jonathan Weiss teaching us why his direct drive turntable, and all direct drive turntables, “if designed properly”, are better than belt drive turntables.
I am not curious about exploring alternatives to my Lamm SET amplifiers. Perhaps you should move this lesson over to the SET dedicated thread. More people are likely to appreciate your expertise and information about your products over there.
I am not curious about exploring alternatives to my Lamm SET amplifiers. Perhaps you should move this lesson over to the SET dedicated thread. More people are likely to appreciate your expertise and information about your products over there.
"I have heard the Lamm hybrids sound wonderful through Apogee Scintillas, but the Sigma speaker is not a recommended match." kedar
Blanket statements about amplifiers are usually fruitless. Statements about an amplifier-speaker pairing can be helpful.
I've owned the Lamm M1.2 monos for the last 12 years and found them excellent with the Audio Physics Avanti Century, three different Wilson speakers, the WVL Son and my current JBL M9500s. The M1.2 works very well with ARC linestages (Ref 5SE, Ref 10) and best with Lamm linestages (L2.1 Ref, LL1.1 Sig). They have proved super reliable and likely I will never sell them. I do like the Lamm ML2.2s even more than the M1.2 and with the WVL and JBL they sound best. If the Lamm 'X-Factor' is its distortion signature, it is a signature congruent with that of the human hearing mechanism -- with the way people actually hear.
I get that Ralph is talking his book as do most manufacturers and dealers do on WBF. Having reviewed the Atma-Sphere M-60 and for six years owned his MA-1 Mk.3.1 amps with the MP-1 preamp (a true preamp). I like the Atma-Sphere gear (and said so in print) but the amps were not suited well for the less efficient Wilsons, and autoformers (which I tried) did not help. Build quality is impeccable. Atma-Sphere is highly transparent and its ability to pull out low frequency notes from a mix is the best I've heard; ultimately I find the Lamm bass more natural sounding.
This is correct, it sounded better than Krell, but scintilla is a very unique speaker usually requiring and mated with Krell’s.
For most speakers I rate today, the amplifier choice is just too high to make either of those even in the top ten or maybe twenty
Sounds like my amps. Transformer coupled, differential design PP making 40 watts. Best amp ever in my system.
The ironic thing is that some Wilsons were once easy to drive, like the X1. It and the X2 both worked well with the ML2 and later ML3. Newer ones became less and less friendly…
Why best with Lamm line stages?
In what ways did the Lamm line stages sound better than ARC REF 10?
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