Raven Blackhawk LE... am I going to be disappointed?


Only reason I ask is because it will be pushing Salk Veracity Ht2-TL’s...  Im coming off a Belles Aria, which was fantastic, but wanted to try something different.  My concern is the low wattage of the Raven and low sensitivity of the salks, but my Belles 75 watts sounded better than 3 other nice 225 watt integrateds.  
So, anyone with experience with the Raven Blackhawk LE pushing somewhat low sensitivity speakers chime in and let me know.  



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Several different 50-60 watt tube amps run with different speakers produced bass at least as good as 150-200 watt solid state amps.


Sorry but BS alert.

A watt is a watt unless the specs are juiced differently.

Soft clipping makes X # watts seem to go further because peaks get clipped in a listenable manner. But 50-60 watts is equivalent to only 50-60 watts period no matter how produced. It may sound fine subjectively but it is NOT, repeat NOT, the same as 150-200 in terms of dynamic peaks possible without distortion.

If you have a good combo of amp/speakers,  more power may be overkill at some point unless you have need for even louder potentially ear damaging dynamic peaks, but that is a different story.....just two different ways to effectively slay the beast.


A couple additional thoughts-

1) A High Pass crossover is a very simple device and should not degrade sound quality one bit.  Think about an RIAA equalizer in your phono preamp and the serious amount of EQ it does to the signal.  

2) There are other high quality higher efficiency speaker options.  The Legacy Calibre is an awesome speaker for example.  
A pair of Spendor D7.2s would sing loudly and clearly with the Raven amp.  

3) Tube amps a lot of times will not clip until very loud volumes but usually just run out of gas without making a ruckus.  The midbass and up will continue to increase in volume while the bass will plateau.  

4) I think the OP will be more than happy.  
So I have the Raven hooked up.  It was a preowned hnit and Im having issues with the sub out; it wont adjust the volume on the sub.  It passes the sub signal through the amp with the Raven off... strange.

Anyhow, its not warmed up yet and it actually sounds pretty dang good.  Plays stronger / louder than I expected.  It came with extra tubes too so I may roll some tubes later.  Fun stuff!

Raven will add the sub crossover to older units and since this one has sub out issues anyways...

I may just try returning it and swapping out for something else.  I got it at TMR and they have been really great so far so Im sure they’ll take care of me.  I want to keep my business with them on this so I’d try possibly trading for a different integrated.  The MF NuVista M3 looks interesting as does that Cayin tube integrated.  Problem is, coming off the Belles, its got to sound amazing number 1, then loud number 2.  This Raven is the firdt amp I put up against the Belles that can hold its own in terms of sound quality

I’ll update more here later today when I’ve listened some more
"...Sorry but BS alert. A watt is a watt unless the specs are juiced differently..."

Yes a watt is a watt. There is also "soft" clipping of the tube amp but that has nothing to do with the amps output if measured the same way. But what is different is that most tube amps have very good power supplies, decent transformers and large capacitors. My 25 watt tube mono blocks can hang with ANY 100wpc consumer grade receiver. Cheap under-speced components just don't get you to the same place regardless of the power specification. My little mono-blocks have 4 coke can sized capacitors, you wont see that in any mass consumer amp. So that's why we say there are watts and there are tube amp watts, even when we know a watt is a watt.    
So Im able to get an average of 90dbs with 95db peaks spl at my listening seat...

I am missing a bit of dynamics / slam that I had with Belles but the Raven is slightly more open and clear.  

We’ll see we’ll see