I'm having a hard time comprehending what I'm reading, since it doesn't seem to match up with my experiences at all.
When I auditioned Maggie 3.6's, the dealer used a CJ Premier 17LS preamp and MV55 or MV60 power amp. At moderate volume, it was dreadfully obvious that the power amp was simply out of gas. The room was not large but did have a fairly high ceiling (12'?), although a lot of it was pretty live. And I didn't play almost anything that would call the maximum from the power amp, just a couple of fairly deep bass notes from a synthesizer. Now these are 3.6's, but they are spec'ed within 1dB of the 1.6s, and the 50+ wpc was clearly and obviously not enough. From what I heard, I don't think this is really an opinion - it was fact. But then, other folks seem to like it.
I'm also floored at the notion of running Martin Logans with SETs. My room is small (14x15) and my ML mains regularly pull at least 50-100W peaks out of my amps (and I'm measuring this, I'm not guessing even though my amps don't have meters). I can't imagine how even a 20W SET could fail to run out of gas. This is especially true since I am using a powerful sub to augment the bass.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the magic of SETs driving these planar speakers - but my experiences with them, especially with those 3.6's, is that anything except chamber music simply pulls too much power.
When I auditioned Maggie 3.6's, the dealer used a CJ Premier 17LS preamp and MV55 or MV60 power amp. At moderate volume, it was dreadfully obvious that the power amp was simply out of gas. The room was not large but did have a fairly high ceiling (12'?), although a lot of it was pretty live. And I didn't play almost anything that would call the maximum from the power amp, just a couple of fairly deep bass notes from a synthesizer. Now these are 3.6's, but they are spec'ed within 1dB of the 1.6s, and the 50+ wpc was clearly and obviously not enough. From what I heard, I don't think this is really an opinion - it was fact. But then, other folks seem to like it.
I'm also floored at the notion of running Martin Logans with SETs. My room is small (14x15) and my ML mains regularly pull at least 50-100W peaks out of my amps (and I'm measuring this, I'm not guessing even though my amps don't have meters). I can't imagine how even a 20W SET could fail to run out of gas. This is especially true since I am using a powerful sub to augment the bass.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the magic of SETs driving these planar speakers - but my experiences with them, especially with those 3.6's, is that anything except chamber music simply pulls too much power.