Oh I'm pretty sure we are talking about the same thing when it comes to breathing. It was that very thing that pulled me in the first time I heard a 300B and that was only on an Antique Sound Lab integrated with 2 way monitors I had in my newly wed flat with an Arcam CD player. Wow so long ago. At that time I was doing second or third hand Levinsons and entry maggies, dynaudios and B&Ws. There was something there, then found BAT, then Lamm. SETs now an integral internal reference 300Bs, 2a3s, and 45s as I made many friends in the local DIY community. The thing is for me is that I will admit it, I'm a bass head. If I had any musical chops my dream would be to be Jaco LOL In geek speak my slope would be definitely a live slope in a large space, much steeper than the B&K but the bass HAS to be articulate and controlled with no droning, The only time I've heard these with sets and horns was at a dear friend from one of our southern islands Victor Sierra who was long ago part of the Victor Brooks tandem out of Utah. He had HUGE horns he woodworked with his team and he always multi-amped these set ups. Last week when we met up at the show he laughingly told me a story that at one point one pair of his base horns "accidentally crept out of the back of his house into his cousin's property because the horns that stuck out of his wall reached there. He's now playing with his own field coil designs and is poised to make an international release. Smaller is what he promised his wife. He is a happy Stavros fan owning the DAC and Amps complaining only that he would have to be a slave with his own build to Stavros' penchant for making 12v output DACs and low gain stages down the line. He's having a ball with Aries Cerat for sure. There's a picture of his entry level 3 way horns I baby sitted in my room with Lamm L2 Ref and ML2.1s in the Stromtank brochure book in fact. Lovely, well integrated highs and mids but the bass couldn't catch up, even with a pair of RELs for the crawl. Small scale classical, Opera and jazz however was to die for.
I'm all about a coherent wave front and that needs either bigger speakers I can't fit or power that emulates if not perfectly traits I will never let go off with SETs. The initial attraction to CH was in their linearity on the top end to RCA 2a3s. A tube I actually prefer to 300Bs. I maintain a small collection of Original 300Bs and RCA 2a3s along with 300B re-issues. I think when people say I moved to CH because they are tube like they think it was more in the, you know, maybe the el34 vein or 300B being used in a moderately sensitive speaker. Many will probably be shocked to hear how linear a 300B is in a true 100dB 8ohm speaker. It was more for the top end and the bottom end, the midrange to bridge the two came later with the .x upgrades to the 1 series and now the 10 series. Battery power sealed the deal. In my limited knowledge the elephant in the room is solid state rectification, I was shown by a very smart engineer that this is where line noise does its damage. Taking as much of that noise away as possible as CH does with its robust high Kvar filtration in their power supplies minimizes that noise, feeding them even cleaner AC from a battery based quality inverter like the Stromtank is the closest I've hear to tube rectification. Add this all up and its a different breath but no longer that different. I don't know what the future will hold but the trend is in a positive direction as far as I can see.
I kept the P-135 that uses 45s. These IS our top seller by the way. Big bang for the buck, My cousin gave me Cunninghams but use the not too shabby KR 45s to prolong the life of the Cunninghams, I also maintain a pair of 1610 DX2s and a pair of VA-200s. The KR Yin and Yangs. These are high powered and think they will go well with both the Ultra 7s which have I believe are a true 91 dB/w/1m and the Marten Septet, both fairly benign impedance loads.
What I see down the line is Victor building me a set of Horns someday of moderate size and multi-amping them. That is very challenging stuff even if I did have another large well sorted space to house them. It would also likely be a digital based system because these systems will be in two different cities, my city and future country escape. So it is a long way off. I was thinking about what I said about going to munich and over dinner realized the smart thing to do is go with a local guy who has proven to me time and time again that he has the chops, humble as he is in life and demeanor. Cracking sense of humor too. Being buddies aside from local helps in the dinero department too. That stuff doesn't grow on trees unless you have an orchard which I don't.
VSA speakers have that balance I like, they aren't that overly punchy bass that can be fatiguing but can be very textural and tuneful. Bass that blooms but can also stop on a dime. They are also very, very coherent WHEN you put in the work in both placement and employing the autoformers properly. Like the CH there are a lot of parameters to play with. Luckily I've been working with VSA since 2005 and I think I know their unique dispersion pattern and the set up procedures to bring the best out of them more than most learning directly from Albert over 10 different models. A dozen and a half since Leif and Damon took up the cudgels. I've also been working with CH for years now, one might say before they were famous. Getting these two to gel, I admit took some time as I learned on the fly to combine them and some hair loss but as we know, there are no free lunches in this game. An inspiration is Steve who to this day is continuing to get more and more out of his X2s than I could ever imagine achieving with those loudspeakers. Our systems always sounded good out of the box but getting to what I consider great will always takes effort.
