Hi
I have been sitting in the fences watching several debates and frankly I feel less and less inclined to engage into debating. I am still an audiophile at heart and hope the industry will regain its footing and move toward providing better reproduction in our homes. I was planning to take a trip to the Pacific North West this month because I am very interested in the speakers Mike is presently using, the EVO 3. I think I will build my next system around them. I have no doubt they are the real deal ... A new and unforeseen contract has changed most of my plans for a break from a busy year .. I expect to audition the EVO at another time maybe early next year.. as they say in French " Ce n'est que partie remise" IOW I am taking a rain check on this month audition of these speakers. I am disgressing so let's get to the meat of things...
I have had speakers with great midrange, I have heard systems with great "something". I have seen people chasing some kind of a sound, usually a part of the spectrum and purposely skew their system balance toward the utmost reproduction of the "preferred" frequency band ...
Let's suppose the following. A speaker which can only reproduce, say, the band from 500 Hz (no typo) to 6 Khz.. i-e bass above where the room tends to mess bass up and up to the lower treble... Listening to such a speaker, I am sure most would hear things they have not heard before... Simply because they will not be obscured by anything else.. Indeed one will hear a lot of things that were not clear when the whole music was playing... If you isolate the drum track on a multi-track recording, I am also certain one will hear things from the drums one would not have heard otherwise.. To me that is what most of these limited systems do…
A 3 watts amplifier in most instances and driving medium-sensitivity speakers would tend to do the same IMO. One will hear things because the amplifier will not reproduce other things very well.. Actually the amp potentially can but may not be able to drive the speakers into reproducing everything equally thus you hear some things you didn’t before and of course the brain will fill up for the blanks or the near-blanks… Of course people may like that… It may please. Would it be correct? I have more than doubts.
Concerning the need to move forward for things to play “better”, l would imagine that for a given speaker there is an optimal position, especially multi driver speakers.. Moving somewhat suggest to me that there is a need for more SPL… The point of convergence of the different drivers will NOT vary with the amplifier used, unless this amps has a DSP that would delay or advance band of frequencies.. The notion of DSP is likely (euphemism) to be anathema to an analog lover using a SET amp…
I have had the experience of using speakers with powered woofers and the amps bass quality seems to come through regardless. I have had this experience with Genesis Gen II , Gen V ( a speaker which for some reasons gets no respect despite being a superb transducer) and the bass quality did clearly depend on the amplifier used.. That was consistent and somewhat surprising at first but the quality attributed to low bass is very dependent on that of the upper bass registers … so …
My conclusion seems to be more in line with that of many here.. 3 watts require 100 plus dB sensitivity and easy speaker load, there are a few out there … For my part , the type of music , I listen to and my view of music reproduction, 3 watts will not cut it with these speakers, I would go toward headroom, lot of it and for me it starts north of 300 watts/ch.