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ARC...D-90B or D-115MKII? - Driving Maggie 1.6s

Greetings!

I'm about to venture into tubes and don't want to spend a ton of money. I'm looking at these two amps for approximately the same price.

Is one of these better than the other? I'm expecting delivery of my Magnepan 1.6s on Thursday. It seems like both amps would have enough power to drive them w/o much difficulty, so I'm just looking for comments from anyone who's familiar with these pieces.

BTW - The rest of the system will be:

Audio Research CD-1
Audio Research LS-9
Interconnects are Homegrown Audio Super Silver and Audioquest Opal X3. Speaker cables will be either Audioquest GR-8 or Goertz MI2.

Thanks so much,

Dan
danheather

Showing 1 response by baddlcif61f

baddlcif61f
1 posts
 
Just a note... I own a D90 (orig w/6550s) and if I recall
the D115 was made in (more or less) the same era. I just purchased/installed the cap upgrade from Audio Research and it was well worth it. I had no idea what I was missing... As an EE and former tech, I still have problems thinking that it would make that much difference, but the fact is that either of these amps run pretty warm and power supply caps will have a degraded lifespan (avg 20-30+ years gets cut down to more like 15+)... I am driving B&W N804s with no problems and lots of reserve power so I can not imagine the 115 not having enough.

Just my $0.02.
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