Buying the correct amp for my speakers

[gmgraves]

Congrats on the Martin Logan’s. Specifically, M-Ls aren’t a difficult load, power wise. The specs say 20 - 400 Watts, but 20 is too low. 60/channel or better should suffice. I’d stay away from tubes with the M-Ls. At very high frequencies, electrostatic speakers, have very low impedances, like less than 1 ohm at 20, KHz. Most importantly is the quality of the amp. ESL speakers like Martin Logan’s are very clean, with extremely low distortion. You might want to pair them with a very clean amp. I have a friend who has a pair of the smaller Martin Logan Electromotion speakers and he gets excellent results with the combination of the Emotiva TA-100 preamp/DAC/FM tuner combo and the BASx A-300. These two units together are just under $800 and the amp is rated at 150 Watts per channel. Order them direct from Emotiva.com.

I was very impressed with the sound (how can they do that for the price???).  Well, part of the answer is that they sell direct. The rest is a mystery, but the equipment is well made, punches well above it’s weight, and looks good. An excellent integrated amp that would work well with M-Ls in this price range would be the Schiit Ragnarok. Rated at 60 Watts/channel, like all Schiit equipment, it is made in USA, and is extremely high quality. The downside is it’s over your budget at $1500 ($1750 with DAC). If $1k is your ceiling go with the Emotiva separates, if you can afford the Schiit unit, you can’t go wrong with that either Hope this helps!

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Congrats on the Martin Logan’s. Specifically, M-Ls aren’t a difficult load, power wise. The specs say 20 - 400 Watts, but 20 is too low. 60/channel or better should suffice. I’d stay away from tubes with the M-Ls. At very high frequencies, electrostatic speakers, have very low impedances, like less than 1 ohm at 20, KHz. Most importantly is the quality of the amp. ESL speakers like Martin Logan’s are very clean, with extremely low distortion. You might want to pair them with a very clean amp. I have a friend who has a pair of the smaller Martin Logan Electromotion speakers and he gets excellent results with the combination of the Emotiva TA-100 preamp/DAC/FM tuner combo and the BASx A-300. These two units together are just under $800 and the amp is rated at 150 Watts per channel. Order them direct from Emotiva.com.

I was very impressed with the sound (how can they do that for the price???).  Well, part of the answer is that they sell direct. The rest is a mystery, but the equipment is well made, punches well above it’s weight, and looks good. An excellent integrated amp that would work well with M-Ls in this price range would be the Schiit Ragnarok. Rated at 60 Watts/channel, like all Schiit equipment, it is made in USA, and is extremely high quality. The downside is it’s over your budget at $1500 ($1750 with DAC). If $1k is your ceiling go with the Emotiva separates, if you can afford the Schiit unit, you can’t go wrong with that either Hope this helps!

 

4 hours ago, vdaman18 said:

Thanks for the responses. Ill look into those. Do you think the sonos is worth a try though? Its a "Class-D digital amplifier. 125W/Ch at 8 ohms" 

 

Im just starting with all of this so I doubt I would notice much of a difference between amps. At the moment I just want it to work and be noob friendly. I like that I can connect my tv directly to the sonos amp, it has wifi and the app. Ill mostly be using streaming services to play music.

Not a great idea. Class D amps will see the low (less than 1 Ohm at 20 KHz) impedance of the Martin Logans as a short circuit. It won’t hurt the speakers, but the amp might suffer. My advice is to stick with linear amps for the time being. Someday..., who knows.

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

Depends on which Class D unit you're talking about. As mentioned above, the Purifi amp modules are excellent in this area - from the spec sheet: 20-20kHz, Iout=1A - Output Impedance <0.65 mΩ ... a 1 ohm speaker impedance will be fine for the amp to handle.

Of course, but the OP’s amp budget is ~$1K US.

[gmgraves]

10 hours ago, firedog said:

 

 

NCore amps will drive 2 ohm loads, despite what George claims.

Certainly you can get such an amp new  for less than $1K; and especially since used ones are on the market due to newer boards such as Purify and the NC1200 that some NCore users are upgrading to. If you are interested, I suggest you check out of any ML owners use them and what their experience is.

Firedog, my friend, I’ve claimed nothing. How could I, I’ve no experience with NCore amps. I merely warned the Newbie OP to play it safe. And aren’t most NCore amps power amps? OP needs both power amp and preamp.