amps on front of bottlehead page

[aragorn723]

What kind of amps are those on the front page of the bottlehead website?

Dave

[Doc B.]

?

[Grainger49]

Dave, you might give Dan a link so he knows what you are asking.

[denti alligator]

He probably means the room full of Paramounts.

[aragorn723]

that must be it, looks like they are  on ikea bookshelves.  Are those amps all hooked up?

Dave

[Paul Joppa]

All hooked up and running. One for each woofer (there are eight), four in a special arrangement driving each midrange (which is not very efficient but sounds really really good) and one on each ribbon tweeter. There's a fairly complex crossover upstream of the amps. Doc B has been trimming and tuning these for a long time - a decade maybe? Good speakers are a heck of a lot of work!

[mcandmar]

Out of curiosity what are the speakers?

[Doc B.]

Actually we have trimmed back from that old photo and right now there is only one amp per two woofers, so only four bass amps. Don't want to get excessive with the amp count! The speakers are something we have cooked up over the past 7 years. I needed something that sounded comparable to the $60K-$180K speakers my partners use in their mastering rooms and I didn't have a spare $180K laying around so we have done it for somewhat less. Drivers are Raal ribbons, ATD Hypergraph midranges and Exodus Audio woofers. You can't get any of those but the Raals these days. The system is capable of roughly 105dB peaks and is pretty well around 35-20kHz +/- 3dB in room.

PJ is right that this system has been going thru an evolution for many years. If you look at the system in the video, that is pretty close to the current setup. You can see that the drivers have been rearranged and time aligned for the sweet spot. The room has had a lot of tuning done as well. That is a large part of the system equation, that most people overlook or compromise for various reasons.