Chops
Well-known member
As the title says, I'm running a mint pair of SL3's that were built in January of 1998, and they are still performing flawlessly as ever. I've owned them for around 5 years but stopped using them a few years ago because no matter what gear I used or if I bypassed their crossovers and ran them totally active, I could not get the right sound out of them, nor could I get a proper sound stage and imaging from them. Some of the issue was in fact the gear, but the biggest issue were the rooms I had to work with.
Now that we are in a house of our own finally, and I claimed full rein of the main room (family room) of the house, I am actually getting somewhere with these near six foot tall beauties. The house was built in 1951 and is solid with heavy plaster walls and ceiling, and natural oak floors that we had resurfaced before moving in. I always wanted an accent wall, so we decided on a coffee brown color and light grey for the rest of the house, and pure white gloss trim. We also sanded down and refinished all of the hardwood doors throughout the house.
Also, because this house is so old, the only grounded outlets in the entire house were in the bathroom, kitchen and laundry room. Before I installed my PS Audio Power Port socket, we had an electrician come in and run a dedicated ground to the existing outlet on the wall where the system resides.
I won't going into detail about the system as I have everything listed in my signature below. I will say though that I run a variety of NOS tubes in the Schiit Freya+ preamp, although at the moment, I threw in the stock JJ 6SN7's that came with the preamp. They only had about 30 hours on them before I put in my first set of NOS tubes. I just put the stock tubes in a couple days ago and have had them running 24/7 since to get some hours on them. They actually don't sound half bad at all.
As you can see, I have a pair of Aegir Class A Continuity amps, running them in mono, which they are rated at 80 watts @ 8 ohms. Though it doesn't mention it anywhere on their website nor in the owners manual, there was a paper provided at a few shows when these amps debuted that stated that they were also capable of 160 watts into 4 ohms mono. It must be true because I've been powering the SL3's this way for the past couple of weeks. The amps don't run any hotter than normal, they don't distort at all, and sound damn good with these speakers. Only thing is, if I play them just a touch too loud with peaking hitting around 97 - 98 dB, the amps will shut down. When this happens, I just have to flip the main switch on the back panel of the amps, wait a second then flip them back on and everything is perfectly fine. I'm just chalking it up to the fact that the little Aegir amps can't handle the impedance swings while in mono mode and go into over-current protect mode. Makes sense. So I am actively looking for a replacement amp or amps, and I think I might have found one. Trying to work out a deal as we speak, but I'll just leave it at that for now.
And lastly, some pics of the setup as it sits...
Now that we are in a house of our own finally, and I claimed full rein of the main room (family room) of the house, I am actually getting somewhere with these near six foot tall beauties. The house was built in 1951 and is solid with heavy plaster walls and ceiling, and natural oak floors that we had resurfaced before moving in. I always wanted an accent wall, so we decided on a coffee brown color and light grey for the rest of the house, and pure white gloss trim. We also sanded down and refinished all of the hardwood doors throughout the house.
Also, because this house is so old, the only grounded outlets in the entire house were in the bathroom, kitchen and laundry room. Before I installed my PS Audio Power Port socket, we had an electrician come in and run a dedicated ground to the existing outlet on the wall where the system resides.
I won't going into detail about the system as I have everything listed in my signature below. I will say though that I run a variety of NOS tubes in the Schiit Freya+ preamp, although at the moment, I threw in the stock JJ 6SN7's that came with the preamp. They only had about 30 hours on them before I put in my first set of NOS tubes. I just put the stock tubes in a couple days ago and have had them running 24/7 since to get some hours on them. They actually don't sound half bad at all.
As you can see, I have a pair of Aegir Class A Continuity amps, running them in mono, which they are rated at 80 watts @ 8 ohms. Though it doesn't mention it anywhere on their website nor in the owners manual, there was a paper provided at a few shows when these amps debuted that stated that they were also capable of 160 watts into 4 ohms mono. It must be true because I've been powering the SL3's this way for the past couple of weeks. The amps don't run any hotter than normal, they don't distort at all, and sound damn good with these speakers. Only thing is, if I play them just a touch too loud with peaking hitting around 97 - 98 dB, the amps will shut down. When this happens, I just have to flip the main switch on the back panel of the amps, wait a second then flip them back on and everything is perfectly fine. I'm just chalking it up to the fact that the little Aegir amps can't handle the impedance swings while in mono mode and go into over-current protect mode. Makes sense. So I am actively looking for a replacement amp or amps, and I think I might have found one. Trying to work out a deal as we speak, but I'll just leave it at that for now.
And lastly, some pics of the setup as it sits...
