Buying the correct amp for my speakers

[firedog]

50 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Its important that the amp is a good match for your speaker electrical characteristics. Wattage isn't as important as what does it take to drive them well. At the $1K price tag Odyssey Khartago has quite a following but it would be best to have comments from someone who has used it with Martin Logans.

For Odyssey go to the Odyssey thread at audiocircle. For sure there you would find ML and Odyssey orders.

[firedog]

8 minutes 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.

I'm not familiar with that specific amp, but some Class D amps aren't designed to work with impedances of less than 4 ohms. Check the specific amp. In general, with Class D you'd do fine with NCore or Purify amps-they won't be bothered by the low impedances. 

[firedog]

6 hours ago, gmgraves said:

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

 

8 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 

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.

 

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]

25 minutes ago, cjf said:

OK, I'll be an odd ball. I would recommend against any of the NCore based Class D amps for these speakers.  I've owned the Hypex NC-400, NC-1200, Merrill Audio Veritas Mono's and Mola Mola Kaluga Mono's over the past several years.

 

All those amps worked perfectly on B&W 803d2's which are known to be a bit "pigish" but that all changed once I got my Magico's. Not a single one of them could cope with the Load the Magico's presented to them. They all puked RF or similar sounding noise out of the speakers, even before any music would be playing.

 

Now if this happened with only one of them I would call it a fluke but on all them, that's a genuine problem with their ability to handle low impedance loads.

 

The Magico's are labeled as 4ohm speakers but testing has shown them to dip into single digit or less loads at high freqs, much like the ML's mentioned previously.

 

Just my experience and two cents of course

 

Okay, that's good info. All the more reason for someone who wants ML speakers to find an owner who's tried them with any amp being considered.