Not that i am in any rush to spend anymore money right now, plus i am really enjoying what the 552 is doing but lol .
Right now i have 3 olive 250’s running my ovators S600’s and to be fair they sound great, but then i would have said the same about my 52 this time last week, so i am open to the idea that things could be better.
But looking at it i could go in the future with
300dr x 3 or maybe 2 if the 3rd is not really needed?
Or 500 non dr x 2.
Now trying these 2 systems at home is probably going to be very difficult but i guess quite a few have experience in above and would like to know which way you think would be better suited to the ovators
@Dunc - the 552 will continue to surprise you for very many months as you realise it is giving you new insights into music that you thought you knew inside out. That journey can be enjoyed for a long time. It’s nice to muse on ‘what ifs’ and ‘what next’ but my advice would be to just sit back and luxuriate in what the 552 will reveal for you.
Also, you really need to establish a new baseline of your system’s performance before you will be in a position to properly evaluate what different power options will bring to the party. That will take time.
Some years ago at a Naim open day at Salisbury I had an interesting conversation with an other audiophile who had recently gone from a 6 pack 135 driving active Isobarics to a 500, no DR at that time, to passive Isobarics. Dealer removed the active crossovers. He preferred the passive speakers driven by the 500.
This inspired me to trade my 2 x 135’s for a 500. When I had this DRd my dealer loaned me their 300DR. I was initially impressed, but missed my 500. When it came back it was a worthwhile upgrade and some! Took the usual extended time to ruin in.
Its a great amp with the nickname 750 by some.
Douglas.
Dunc
There are a number of issues here.
Active versus passive; Best match for a 552 ie 300 or 500, DR vs non DR; Ovator 600s or possibly other speakers
That said my preference for a 552DR definitely would be a 500 and even more so a 500DR. My guess is that a 500DR passive will outperform your 3x 250 active.
If you can live passive again fine, but probably youll feel the itch once having been active to stay active. So the long term goal probably will be active 500DRs. You can get there wonky as interim solutions until fully active with 500s. Along the journey you may feel that there are other speakers that might be superior to the Ovators but again thats a personal preference. Most important enjoy the journey and make your own judments…
I’ve never understood why people think Active sounds better. The 500 amp as people have stipulated is a brilliant amp. When I first hooked it up, even without any warm up, I was simply blown away at the detail, bass precision, timing etc. My dad used to have a complete active system with Linn and it was expensive and quite frankly overrated. And guess what? 12 years later, he went back to passive, so what does that tell you…
Malla, no offence please, but I could think of several reasons wyh someone would down grade back from active to passive …space, lost interrest, different preferences, too many boxes, deteriorating hearing abilities, etc. I have never experienced an active Linn system, yet all I can say is that going active after running 552/500/DBLs passive for over 10 years active is a huge and I really mean huge improvement.
No offence taken. We can agree to disagree. My life experience dictates that active is overrated and expensive, maybe this is a good business model for Linn. Passive for me with Naim has been a refreshing eye opener. It shows that a good amp can make all the difference.
Absolutely and I possibly couldn’t disagree more with you. It’s because my experience is quite to the contrary to yours that is my now 500s active dbls are in a completely different league than before passive and i couldn’t rate the performance of my system now high enough. Now you may argue it’s a buyers bias, pride of ownership or possibly both and the same is true for all the other folks with active systems praising them ravenously. Innocent bystanders that have listened to someone else’s active system may similarly be biased because of courtesy or simply envy. I may argue you have never listened to a top 500dr active system. So is there a solution? It may have to do with somebody’s perspectives. Its actually not that life experience dictates a persons perspective but quite the opposite a persons perspective will dictate his or her life experience and thus he will come up with a different story. Being aware of that the benefit of such an approach is that it eliminates the need of being judgmental. So absolutely, we don’t have to agree, and we are both still fine, what we do have is to be friendly. Besides, I am grateful as you made me think about all that as you mentioned „my life experience dictated“ …
Well I guess I will end up with 2 x 500 amps and run like that into my S600’s.
But will need to try one first and see how it goes as I quite fancy a full 500 system, its.just a large out lay.
Or I could look at selling my lovely active S600 and floating snaxo, supercap and my 3 amps and replace with say a 500dr and passive speakers.
That’s a big direction move
