what speakers are you using? How many hours on them? What tubes and how many hours on them in the Ref 76? The SP20 should not give you any sibilance. What tubes are you running in the SP20? How many hours on them? Did you say your ears were hurting before you bought the new ARC amp?
Certain frequencies hurt
Recently, due to certain frequencies coming across excessively loud and hurting my ears I've decided to run headphones (Sennheiser HD 800 or Hifiman HE 6se) instead of speakers through my power amps speaker taps. Then I ran across this yesterday:
"I’ll point out you need to be careful with Tube based speaker amps, they are designed to drive a specific impedance, and you’d want to match that with either a resistor in parallel with the headphones or a transformer to impedance match.
It’s also the case that more powerful tube speaker amps will self destruct/blow a fuse if a load is not connected to the terminals, because without the reflected impedance the circuit will draw too much current."
So will running headphones through my Audio Research Ref 75 possibly cause harm to the amp or preamp (both tubes)? The sound is sublime and it causes me no pain. Is this (speaker) set-up overkill for these headphones?
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@ erik_squires I did not change power cords to "fix" my ears hurting. The ears started hurting "after" installing new power cords. I got upgraditis and thought changing the generic power cords for "better ones" would increase SQ. The solid state amp started sounding a bit more etchy after that change so I thought switching it out for another Audio Research component would improve the synergy. @ curiousjim I built a pair of OB speakers about a year ago with an increase in the amount of microdetails. No hurting ears. Prior speakers were Monitor Audio Gold 300's. No pain. The SP 20 only has mild sibilance when I use the headphone jack with the Senn 800's, none when I connect any headphones through the Ref 75 power amp speaker taps. The SP 20 is running 6H30Pi tubes with around 550 hours. The Ref 75 came with KT120 output and 6H30 tubes for the input stage. I was told they had about 200 hours on them. Listening volumes are between 65 -78dB. Softer volumes, no pain at all. Even if I hit 80dB it's only certain frequencies that hurt, not everything. There are some pics of my system on virtual systems. Haven't updated the power amp pic yet. |
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