Another Newbie thread.......

[Mobs]

Since the purchase of my Vista's, I am dying to add an amplifier to my set up. My Denon 4308 Bi Amping the Vistas does a nice job, but I know it can be better.....much better.

Few questions to those with Sunfire amps......

Are you using the voltage and current outputs to drive the highs and lows in your Bi-Wire or Bi-Amp setup?

If so, how big of a difference is there in sound?

Another question is about watts and forgive me for my ignorance. The Vista's are rated @ 200 watts. The Sunfire amp is rated 400 watts @ 4 ohms.

Isn't that just too much for the Vistas? I wanted some expert advice before I spent the cash only to blow up my Vistas.

Thanks in advance!


Later

 

[JonFo]

Hi, and welcome to the club!

Sunfires make great parings with ML’s due to all the options they offer.

The current source yields a slight decrease in high frequency response from the speaker that many people prefer.
Partially this is because being Dipole in nature, ML’s can generate too much high frequency energy in a room, and benefit from some decrease in output at the high end. Another way to deal with that is some absorption behind the panels.

Use the voltage source for the woofers. As they would be negatively impacted if driven from the voltage source.

As for overpowering your Vista’s, that would be hard to do. I run 400w (actually more like 800w at 4 ohms) into each panel in my rig (I biamp all around) and have never hurt the panels. I don’t think it’s physically possible to hurt them via the amp.

So you can definitely use them with a TGA7200 (or even a TGA 7400) with no worries.

 

[Mobs]

Excellent news!!!

Thanks again!


Later

 

[slowGEEZR]

Another question is about watts and forgive me for my ignorance. The Vista's are rated @ 200 watts. The Sunfire amp is rated 400 watts @ 4 ohms.

Isn't that just too much for the Vistas? I wanted some expert advice before I spent the cash only to blow up my Vistas.

Thanks in advance!
Later

I must have seen/heard this question a hundred times over the years. (I must be old.) You can, of course, hurt your speakers with too much power by driving the amplifier into clipping. But that would require extremely loud listening levels and would be painful to listen to. The more common way to burn out a speaker is to use an amp that doesn't supply enough power to the speaker for the sound level you want to listen at. In this case, clipping is more likely to occur when you turn up the amp to produce the loud sound, but the amp can't handle it. When a typical solid state amp clips, power spikes two to ten times the amps rated power are sent to the speaker. This is what can blow a loudspeaker. An advantage of tube amps is that their clipping is usually softer than a transistor amp. However, some transistor amps are designed to "soft" clip, too. Anyway, that's my understanding.

 

[Pcar928fan]

I must have seen/heard this question a hundred times over the years. (I must be old.)

You ARE old! But you are still fast and that is ALL THAT MATTERS! LOL!
Love you long time my friend!

 

[Brian_74]

Congrats on your Vista purchase! I have a Sunfire TGA-5200 running my Vantages (200x5 into 8ohm). I'm using the current source outputs to drive them. It's been argued that there is no advantage to bi-amping the Vantage since they have a built in powered woofer. Not so in your case so bi-amping as suggested (current for panels and voltage for woofers) would probably be best. Definitely stick with voltage source for the woofers. The beauty of the Sunfire is that you can experiment and see what sound you like best on the panels.

Note, if you simply hook up the current and voltage source outputs of the Left and Right channels of the Sunfire, you won't be truly bi-amping, since there is only one discrete amplifier per channel. Rather what you could do is use two other channels of a 5 or 7 channel Sunfire and run your woofers using those. The Sunfire provides you a wonderful RCA pre-out for each channel that makes it super easy to chain multiple amplifier channels together. It's a very versatile amp, runs super cool, and matches great sonically to ML.

My 5200 gets plenty loud! I can't imagine what a 5400 would do.