a friend is going to buy my other speakers but he wants my preamp and amp as well which is fine. who needs 220watts with 95db speakers?

so i'm looking around and thinking i'll get a used amp, maybe a small SET but i'm wondering...will 1.8-2 watts really drive my speakers to acceptable levels?
what about if you have a record or cd that is recorded kinda low?

i'm looking at stuff like decware or bottlehead, or tubelab kits.
i also see stuff like copys of dynaco's, those are more like 17watts which seems more reasonable.
the decware's seem cool because they can be run without a preamp and the input sens. on the se84 is 2v.
i hear they are a little bit thin in the bass. could someone get around that by rolling tubes?

alas, i have a bottlehead foreplay III kit is still haven't put together would that produce more headroom?

How loud will 2 watts play? I easily get average 85dB and peaks of 95 with my 1.8 watt amp and 4 Pi Pros w/o a pre-amp. 12x18 room. There is lttle 'headroom', of course, i.e., rock bands will play loud but full orchestras will stress and clip the amp.

The 2 Pis have a lot of 'apparent' bass so I wouldn't worry about that. They're also a bit on the warm side with less detail than you get with better drivers. This makes them a good candidate for one of the inexpensive chip amps, at least until your experience grows.

I personally think the ST-70 is waaay over-rated. Depending on your budget, the Audio Note Kits 6550 amp would be great or build the JE Labs 300B, schematics and pix of the wiring are everywhere. I'm not familiar with the Decware or BH Sex amp.

I built one of these a few years ago and it blew away an ST-70 I had at the same time: Ella on Audiogon

i'll look into the audio note stuff if it's in my budget. i'm kinda trying to keep that down a bit though :-\

Just to be stupid I tried the Two Pis with a set of old Baldwin organ amps, which are PPP 6L6s pushing about 120 wpc. Very nice - really showed what the Pis could do, but this was complete overkill for the bedroom.

Put that Foreplay III together, it has plenty (10dB) of gain.

with the sv83 output tubes, when i'm home alone and want to the listen loud the amp will usually end up clipping.
swapped in the EL84 and there it is. no clipping as loud as i want to play it and there is a little more bass too!!!
so setup now the power amp is mullard 12au7 driver, Hammond EL84 output tubes and Mullard 5u4g rectifier.

the one pi had a GR research tweeter (96db tweeter) with 1ohm resistor in series, it was a little hot.
i redid the crossover with an Obbligato cap, 1ohm resistor in series, and put some vifa (ac25) tweeters in there because they fit and madisound was sold out of the dx25. they sound pretty good though and only cost $11 each.