GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: SET amplifiers

Post Subject: SET and SSPosted by Jorge on: 12/13/2014

Hello Gera,

First thing I would do is get rid of the active Xover, in my experience they mud everything up. preamps are very important and this is like a double preamp with a lot of gain stages. For bass you can maybe use it. I use a separate Xover and Bass amp from 110 hz down.

About Low wattage SET, I have right now a 1.5 watt SET amp playing and am very used to 2 watt amps, 9, 12, 18 up to 700 SS watt amp. This is running from 100hz up to 50 khz
Low wattage SET amps are very dynamic when compared to SS amps. At first you crave this dynamics, but later you realize this is probably not very natural, an orchestra playing can handle a lot of different moods, from piano, to pianissimo, to forte or forstissimo... and a world in between which creates the seduction of music. I realized that these low level watt SET amps go directly from piano to fortissimo all the time, with few gradations in between, If you are playing Rock or Girl with guitar, you probably won´t notice, but with a full orchestra this becomes very noticeable.
As you go higher in wattage this effect gets reduced. With a 9 watt 300B things get a better balance.
My favorite amp at the moment (unluckily not mine) is an 18 watt SET amp.

I have not tried 1.5 watts on one driver directly as a Dedicated DSET amp as Romy has yet, I played around a bit only. I would need identical amps because of phase shifts, tunning different amps as DSET is a HUGE job and time alignment becomes really very critical. I would not recommend playing with it unless you have a lot of time on your hands for this. Multi horn systems are already pretty complicated with just one amp. Now the results form DSET from the times I started getting somewhere with it were incredible, really out of this world!

Good SS amps can sound great, finding them is the problem, and bad ones are simply horrible... Bad tube amps are "musical".

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