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speaker or amp distorting

i have jm reynaud arpeggione floorstanders that are a small two way with soft dome tweeter and 6.5 inch paper cone in a transmission line design. they are reasonabley efficient 90db. my amp is a modified jolida 102b with el84 tubes and 25 watts of power. on simple music with without too many dynamic peaks and modest instrumentation i.e. four or five instruments or less this setup is magical. however, with big band or vocals when things ramp up dynamically the treble seems to harden and hurt my ears. occasionally i will hear some distortion. is this the amp or the speaker or something else? thanks
djwilbourn

Showing 2 responses by shadorne

shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,467 posts
 
Probably amp but your speakers can't take a lot more than 100 watts anyway.

A small two way is not ideal for big band. For example yours has only a 1.5" voice coil for the woofer....which is only a half inch bigger than most tweeters - typical of small two ways but as you can imagine it will get hot very quickly at modest levels and the heat will cause thermal compression making it sound dull when approaching realistic big band levels. This is quite normal for small two ways - so don't push it - i don't think a bigger amp will completely help in your case - so be careful spending a lot of money on a big tube amp until you are sure your speakers can take it. (Borrow an amp first)
shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,467 posts
 
thanks for the advice so far guys, the frustrating thing is how good this system sounds when it is not distorting.

Unfortunately getting clean beautiful sound at realistic levels is exponentially challenging - particularly in the bass. It is generally quite easy to get good sound at modest levels/dynamics. Most systems commonly available will all sound pretty good at low levels (otherwise they wouldn't stand a chance to sell)
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