About 20 years ago one of the first reviews ever written on our amps was in TAS. Most of it was written by Steven Stone, who had a set of Apogee Full Range speakers, which were 1 ohm.
At the time we had a product called the Z-Music, which was an autoformer that loaded the amp at about 11 ohms, and provided taps for 4,3,2 and 1 ohms. We set up the MA-1s, which at the time were 100 watts (the later ones are 140) and make no mistake, we are talking about an OTL.
Using the autoformer, the amps and speakers sounded great together, and was the first time Steve heard what the speakers could do with tubes. He made a point of mentioning this in his review. Other than the impedance, they were not hard to drive (they are a fairly resistive load if I recall)- the amps made plenty of power on them, enough that to run them out of gas had the system playing painfully loud. They played bass just fine, the mids were smooth and sweet, also well defined- a really impressive speaker!
We stopped making the Z-Music about 15 years ago, but there is the ZERO (http://www.zeroimpedance.com) that can do a similar job.
We got a Golden Ear Award about 12-13 years ago using a set of our MA-1s on Duettas- without ZEROs or anything; my impression is that Apogees are not that hard to drive and its worth it to try to make tubes do it.
At the time we had a product called the Z-Music, which was an autoformer that loaded the amp at about 11 ohms, and provided taps for 4,3,2 and 1 ohms. We set up the MA-1s, which at the time were 100 watts (the later ones are 140) and make no mistake, we are talking about an OTL.
Using the autoformer, the amps and speakers sounded great together, and was the first time Steve heard what the speakers could do with tubes. He made a point of mentioning this in his review. Other than the impedance, they were not hard to drive (they are a fairly resistive load if I recall)- the amps made plenty of power on them, enough that to run them out of gas had the system playing painfully loud. They played bass just fine, the mids were smooth and sweet, also well defined- a really impressive speaker!
We stopped making the Z-Music about 15 years ago, but there is the ZERO (http://www.zeroimpedance.com) that can do a similar job.
We got a Golden Ear Award about 12-13 years ago using a set of our MA-1s on Duettas- without ZEROs or anything; my impression is that Apogees are not that hard to drive and its worth it to try to make tubes do it.