End of my tether

Noted. Thank you. Not really suffering on tonal accuracy so much as needing to crank it up to get the real deal.

Thoughts on resistors?

As said above … no not recommended at all and I can’t see how it would help… you want to keep the link between power amp and speakers and clean as possible.
If the limiting factor is lack of amp voltage… then I can’t see how resistors can possibly help… your component would need to be an inductor in series, or capacitor in parallel, to attenuate Hf, but that would potentially interfere with the amp output impedance and speaker cross over, and could make your amplifier unstable.

I would looking at better matching amp and speaker and that sounds like that means changing one or the other unfortunately.

Thanks again Simon. The advice is much appreciated. My inclination is to stay as I am at present and enjoy what is, at higher volumes, simply fantastic. Longer term it makes more sense to me to retain the amp and move to speakers of 4 to 12ohm.

Sounds a plan… as long as you are happy with it for the majority of time.

Yes. Was the tether lengthened, eventually? I kind of lost track…

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Certainly am. It would be nice to have more presence/mids at low volume but I’m not going to stress about it when there’s a Christmas tree at one end of the living room likely screwing with the sound anyway until January.

Also, with two new boxes in the system I think that realistically I will need to (re)explore speaker positioning. Once that’s all been addressed I can think about what I want. I don’t see me moving to valve amps as a solution as they simply don’t do it for me. So, possibly a speaker change at some point.

In the meantime, back to ripping boxed sets and keeping an eye on my first backup.

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image
Pinched from Stereophile.

This is from the zuaudio website, and is illustrating the method of using Loading Resistors to match the speaker impedance to better match the load as seen by the amplifier in cases where the amplifier seems to want a better matching. There is a blog post that describs the issue:

This may be what Mike is refering to when he asks about matching resistors.

I have high impedance Rogers LS3/5a which are the 15 ohm versions, and the Rogers BBC Studio monitors (which were 25 ohm) have various taps on a transformer that change the impedance. At the time they were made high impedance speaker (16ohm) was common.

Just to help, not wishing to start anything…

Thank you for all the above @Yeti and @fergch. I’m not clear how I should be reading any of that. Is the suggestion that loading resistors could in fact help? If so, how do I deduce which ones?

From some elsewhere forums, people say that the only suitable amps for Zu speakers would be class A amps, like Nelson Pass. Apart of course tube amps.

Omen appears designed for solid state but right now I’d rather focus on whether I’ve options to improve the current mismatch/lack of warmth.

Hi @trickydickie, hope you are well, good Christmas was had etc? Hope youve been getting some time to enjoy some music too…

Quick question to this - can you give me an example of an album in Qobuz or in MusicBrainz where the CD booklets are available please?

Ive looked at several examples of albums that Ive either purchased direct from Qobuz as a download, or ones that I havent (Qobuz or in MusicBrainz), and I cant for the life of me find where I would be able to download the booklet.

Maybe Im being thick, or maybe Im just unlucky with the albums Im checking out!

ps. apologies for the thread drift @mikehughescq, hope this is OK

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Yes, all good here thanks, hope all is well with you too!

The example I posted above is Stacey Kent, Tenderly

Also, Silje Nergarrds album of the same name, Agnes Obel, Aventine (Bonus Track Edition).

On Musicbrainz try Melody Gardot, The Absence. The one with catalogue number 2792657.

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Unless I missed some posts, are you not using a TT2 as your DAC now Mike? To me your speakers are the perfect candidate to be driven directly off the TT2. I have driven Dynaudio excite 12’s off my TT2 with excellent results. Toonartist drove his PMC speakers directly off his TT2 for quite a while also, and neither one of these speakers are anywhere near as efficient as yours. Have you considered this route?

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Well one can try the resistor in parallel as per the article … … but you will be significantly reducing the efficiency… but I do think there is a risk you will affect the crossover frequencies or resonance of the crossover, but worth a try.

I am indeed using a Hugo 2 TT. Had it and the Zenith a week and have yet to sit down and read the online manual. My understanding was that people who have tried using the DAC, presumably in amp mode (?), straight into speakers have tended to abandon the idea fairly quickly. Am I wrong on this? I need to understand why the DAC would provide a better match.

I could be wrong but my understanding was that my speakers don’t have a cross over as such. One 10” driver plus a super-tweeter.

I think I can probably afford to reduce speaker efficiency given what it measures but in what way could cross over frequencies be impacted and what do you mean by resonance in that context?

The only reason I abandoned it was that I upgraded the excite 12’s I was using to much bigger floorstanders that are harder to drive. Also I decided to get back into Vinyl, so needed an analog preamp/integrated. Going directly from the TT2 to speakers simplifies the chain, so gives you a much purer signal and sounds stunning to my ears.

Same here, but found one in roon/qobuz. Cant see the booklet is available within the naim app.

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On the speaker issue — not sure whether it has been mentioned before, but why not try the TT2 driving the speakers? The TT2 might do a decent job on these highly sensitive speakers…