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Easy to drive, outstandingly natural sound from 40-50 Hz up.....AN-E, O/96, others?

If my goal were to find natural-sounding, dynamic, and efficient speakers that can be driven with a somewhat lower-powered a (i.e., 50-watt SS) amplifier, and that work well with a variety of music, would I be looking at AN-Es, O/96s, or which others?
I am not particularly interested in using a 10-20 watt SET, but being able to use something lower-powered than the 300-watt amplifiers required for my 85dB speakers would open up a lot of other amplifier options and simplify things for me.  I have two fairly high-quality powered subs so the goal would be to fill my (moderately large) room from 40-50 Hz and up and let the subs handle the lower registers.
Any thoughts on the two speakers listed, or recommendations for others?
mitch2
mapman's avatar
mapman
21,830 posts
 
Fritz Carerra.
mitch2 OP
3,682 posts
 
@exlibris 
Where did you find a good-sounding high pass filter made with high quality components, or did you make one yourself.
I have looked at Vandersteen's M7-HP, which is made for their Model 7 series speakers and appears to be well-constructed, but it costs $2K/pair and rolls off from 100 Hz, which is higher than I want.
https://www.vandersteen.com/categories/crossovers
exlibris
438 posts
 
I had it made by my local technician. I was skeptical that it would sound good but it really worked out great.
audiokinesis
2,711 posts
 

Exlibris wrote: "The reason I’m interested in making a change is not because adding subs threw off the balance, it’s because I find the speakers to be a bit "sleepy."

You might try a rear-firing tweeter to add a little bit more top-end energy to the reverberant field. This could theoretically "wake up" the tonal balance a bit WITHOUT screwing up the first-arrival sound and therefore the imaging.

The tweeter could actually sit on the floor behind the Audio Notes, facing upwards. You want to be sure the path lengths from the rear tweeters to your ears are at least a foot longer than the path lengths from the main tweeters to your ears, or else they could screw up the imaging. Probably just a first order crossover (series capacitor and maybe a level-adjusting series resistor),with the calculated F3 being fairly high. To avoid dropping the impedance curve very much, I suggest starting out with a high efficiency tweeter so that you need to add some series resistance to pad it down. Fostex comes to mind.

I'm sure there would be some trial-and-error involved in sorting out the component value(s) for the highpass filter, but ten or fifteen bucks worth of basic capacitors and resistors would get you started, and then you could opt for the more expensive parts once you have the values sorted out. 

Duke

exlibris
438 posts
 
Thanks Duke.  I've been thinking of doing that, at your suggestion, and have been looking at the Townshend maximum supertweeters.  

I'll add one thing...
Sometimes it's as if my system has even less jump after 2 or 3 hours of listening. I've often wondered if this a subjective thing or if it was something in my amplification chain.  Reading a post on another forum, the poster said this could be caused by hot speaker voice coils.  It's a drawback of a speaker being pushed beyond its natural efficiency for a long time.  
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