I decided to try hooking up the S.E.X. to my magnepan LRS speakers (86db/w ~4ohm) just to see what it sounded like. I didn't expect much because from what I had read about magnepans they really want a lot of power and they want a really high damping factor. So the 2 watts per channel and almost 1 to 1 impedance match led me to expect that it wouldn't sound very good.
However, upon firing it up I was amazed that the little 2 watt tubes were completely filling my decently sized room (15'x30'x10'). Furthermore, the sound quality was stunning.
I usually run my LRS with a subwoofer to fill in 20hz-60hz so I got a couple speaker wire to rca adapers and attached my rythmik L12 sub to the speaker outputs of the s.e.x. as well. The input impedance of the subwoofer is over 30kohm so it seems to work fine being fed direct from the speaker taps. The only issue I sometimes get is that certain tracks seem to boost the really low frequencies (20-30hz)on the subwoofer but I used the subwoofers built in notch filter to even that out.
I'm guessing that since the magnepans have a very flat impedance curve they actually play very nice with the transformer output even though they have almost no damping factor but I still don't understand how they are meshing together quite so well. Maybe since they drop out around 50-60hz they naturally are protecting the amp from having to drive the really power hungry low frequencies, but I wouldn't think that would be enough to explain the volume I'm getting from the bottlehead.
Now my little headphone amp has replaced my main stereo amp and I really couldn't be happier.
It taught me another lesson in how hard it is to predict how different equipment will synergize and to not always rely on the conventional wisdom when trying to match things up.
