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Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

RE: Upgrade to floor standing speakers for classical music vinyl listening

I beg your pardon if this is too rudimentary, but let's go back to basics: The wattage rating of the speakers is intended to be a guide to the maximum sustained power they can withstand before the voice-coils in the drivers "melt". You might use speaker power ratings as a *guideline* - it's much better to use a 200 watt/ch amplifier with speakers rated 75 watts, say, than the other way around. Just keep the volume at sane levels where you hear no obvious distortion; brief peaks occurring in musical transients won't hurt anything. More likely are problems rising from using a small amplifier (like 20 watts/ch) to drive insensitive speakers, because the amp might clip as you turn it up loud enough to be satisfying. Clipping amplifiers sound awful and generate horrible distortion that readily causes speakers to fail.

This matter is probably better addressed by looking at the sensitivity of the speakers. To sound reasonably dynamic with 20 watts/ch it will take a speaker of very high sensitivity, expressed like 90 dB/ 1 watt/ 1 meter, or more. Note that it's not about sustained average loud levels, its about dynamics- capturing musical dynamics in a natural way. You may want to check into used Klipsch speakers, these are known to be very sensitive so will yield decent dynamics driven with 20 watts/ch. I saw several pairs for sale around $250-400 on my local (LA) Craigslist. The drawback here is that the trade-offs Klipsch makes in the design to get high efficiency results bright highs and warm bass.

So 20 watts/ch from an "vintage" solid-state amplifier like the Marantz is a challenge to produce natural, room-filling concert-level sound with moderate price floor-standing speakers.

I have a relatively inexpensive system using older Thiel CS-3 speaker driven by 200 watt/ch Adcom 5500 amplifier, a Nelson Pass design. It's old but sounds quite fine with vinyl, especially classicl. I think that's because the Thiel's were designed using LP's as the source by people who really had good ears. My amplifier likewise- it has plenty of juice to power them. You could find a similar amp + speaker for maybe $1000 if you shop carefully for used gear. I had used a Denon DL103 for many years and it sounds excellent with these speakers. The unfortunate aspect here is that it 1.) puts you into "vintage" gear which has its own set of problems, and 2.) puts you on the spiral of "upgrade-itis" Good luck.



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  • RE: Upgrade to floor standing speakers for classical music vinyl listening - mr.bear 08/27/1711:20:58 08/27/17 (0)

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