Aleph 3 - Its 2013, are they still awesome ?

... now I need a right speaker to go with it. damn

> 92dB / 8Ω

Yes. But it was never made for difficult speaker loads. It was a great design.

Hello Essrand,

I listened to some Aleph Designs with Horn speakers and it was always a good combination. The recommendation from Stereo5 - ZU Audio - is interesting, too. Another idea is to check Reference 3A, those speakers are outstanding from Performance, or Verity Audio, but I have no experience with their 2. hand pricing. You can also look what Atma-Sphere used for their demos, probably you can get some new ideas there. The Alephs are quite robust with speakers but they are never made for low impedance speaker designs.

Hello Essrand,

from my experience, the Alephs run very well with a wide range of Preamps, I used Klyne 7, Aesthetix Callisto sign., Lamm L2R, Lamm LL2 and my favorite match was with Lamm units. Specially LL2 (or LL2.1) is amazing (and reliable).
Gain is generally a chain, when you have a weak Preamp output but a high sensitive speaker it doesn't matter so much, but when all is on the downside + a speaker which has a complex X-over (that is important, because such a design can ruin ever a high sensitive speaker design, Wilson, Martin Logan and others) even good units will be not able to serve an effortless reproduction. The Aleph Design itself is outstanding good but a lot of Audiophiles used them with problematic speakers, that was the reason for higher powered Alephs (until Model 1.2) because most Users simply didn't understand that this amp is totally different to others (former Threshold, later the - boring - Pass X-amps ...
It is in a "way" a 300B, but made with Transistors.