Well after a long wait and much soul searching I am finally ordering my new Speakers. I was on the fence more than John Kerry. Sorry about that. Well I was set on the Paradigm Studio 100v4 until I heard the Signature 8. Well I just had to have them, then I happen to run across the amazing Pioneer S-1ex. Once I got over the shock of what an amazing speaker this is I had to overcome my prejudice of having a Pioneer speaker. Now having killed my HT budget just on front speakers I was wondering what I needed to really power these fantastic speakers. I was thinking of Bel Canto, but they are not really a HT electronics designer. Since I have the 990, which I love, maybe an Outlaw amp has what it takes to make my speakers sing. Has anyone had any eperience with Outlaw driving speakers in this class?

Star113 wrote:

Has anyone had any eperience with Outlaw driving speakers in this class?

Rest assured that outlaw amps will be very clean, crisp, with lots of headroom, and transparent. I have two amps. The 7700 drives my KEFs. The discontinued 755 drives my Crown electrostatics. I had initially planned to sell the 755 but I was delighted with the improvement in sound so I (thankfully) kept it.

IMHO you won't be disappionted.

I've driven Paradigm Studios with my Outlaw gear for many years now and have been very pleased with the results. I'd have no qualms trying the Signature line or the Pioneers with Outlaw upstream.

Thanks for the replies. I love the sound of the 990, but I know when my audiophile friends see me driving the S1ex with a "budget amp", and preamp they will think I lost my mind. I recently auditioned the S-1ex at a local store, and wow they also carried Wilson audio as well as some very nice and expemsive Focal gear. I really felt like a kid in a very expensive candy store. They used a Mcintosh tube amp and a Krell preamp, I thought this was a strange mix I was concerned that the amp would not give the bass control the speakers need. It was an amazing sound, but I was right about the bass. The Pioneers need a good solid state amp to control its bass. It will be an interesting match . I did love the Bel Canto combo with the S1ex but i do want them for HT as well as high quality 2 channel.

ed

Tongue in cheek: So you need the “Oooo Aaaa” factor back? Have your Outlaw gear polished and gold plated on the outside. Extol the virtues of gold shielding. Describe how superior shielding results in darker silence and cleaner sound – the power delivered by the power supplies to the components is much less disturbed by external electromagnetic interference leaving full power available for full, accurate bass and warm, sweet highs.

With regard to friends, if you can pull off this kind of act in a convincing manner, you won’t need to pay a manufacturer to do it for you. And since it’s unlikely that any of your friends have gold plated HT processing and amplification, they’ll be wanting what you have.

(Keeping it lighthearted!)

Yeah, peer pressure can be something else. I'll say one thing, Star113: If the knowledge you have enables you to predict the lapses of a McIntosh/ Krell combo, it's probably a good idea to just trust your ears and forget what others think. The temptations of a McIntosh are totally understandable, though. There's one in this vinyl store I've begun frequenting that's just otherworldly.

Tru blu, I think the "unworldly" part of the Macintosh unit in the vinyl store is simply the phono section of the preamplifier - plus, perhaps, what's feeding it in the way of turntable, arm, and especially cartridge. You may have discovered what lots of us know: that, at equivalent dollar levels above mass-market basic (as if there still were such a thing for vinyl), analogue from vinyl simply beats digital from CDs in musical sound quality. I invite the skeptics reading this to compare the same current recording on the two media (hard to find, but there are examples), played back under the same conditions through the same system (after the different inputs of course), and let us all know the result.

You might have a point, psyprof1, but believe it or not, what sounded "otherworldly" were CDs—particularly those new Sly and the Family Stone pressings. The store, though tiny, also has a decent number of digital offerings, and the clerk and I were actually marveling at what a stupendous job Sony did of remastering the Sly stuff. He confessed to sometimes reflexively preferring vinyl, but said he felt this was one of the rare times that there was hardly a discernible difference.

On the flipside of that, though, the other day I played the vinyl and CD versions of tunes from the Jimmy Giuffre 3's 1961 at home for my wife, and the difference was audible instantly. What most surprised me was that the LP and CD came from the same reissue/remastering initiative in 1992, and yet the vinyl was still more revealing, louder and enveloped the listening area better.

Tru blu, I wish I lived in Brooklyn so I could visit you. I note that the record/CD comparison you made involved a 1961 recording, which of course started as an analog tape. I kind of wonder what comparisons using current recordings (which start as digital) would show. The CD would be digital all the way - with maybe some compression or digital bit-reduction, judging from the CDs that boast of being uncompressed! - while the LP copies would have passed through a DAC process. This comparison business might be more complicated than I thought. Once again, welcome to the real world. . .

Okay, so the only thing I have that fits that bill, psyprof1, is a 2002 hip-hop record: I Phantom, by a Boston-bred rapper who calls himself Mr. Lif. Played side by side, the LP version is louder and definitely enhances the bass and the fullness of the mix. But I think the CD—which was undoubtedly the original version—splits up the sounds more; it's better with the details, though to my ears the sound seems less dynamic. Hip-hop arrangements can get pretty layered, and the CD probably did a better of job of displaying how the producer wanted things structured in the sweet spot; you can hear how percussion accents, DJ scratches, muted horn parts and stuff are timed to call attention to things in the lyrics.