db -
I'd somewhat agree with you on the Bryston's of old, but I'm hearing very good reports on the newer SST series. I'll need to get my ears around a 3B SST or 4B SST before I'll judge.
Red Rose (Levinson) certainly makes some great stuff. I owned a No. 383 integrated and it was OK, though IMHO in the end it was not worth the then $6k MSRP considering the sound of some of its peers. I would get close to its power limits when driving the B&W N803's I had with it.
Anyway, I've not heard the Rosebud II's, (their ribbons remind me of the tweeters in the Pass Labs Rushmore's - a $40k speaker/amp system!). However, I wouldn't mind a side-by-side listen with the Rosebud's against some of my fave 2-way monitors - like the Quad 11L or PMC DB1+.
Tangent: for the price, you really should check out the Quad L-series. Awesome sound as well as cabinet finish. My 11L's were the hard to get yew veneer which was really something to behold, and my 21L's were rosewood. Both models' sound was very e-stat-like. I'm not kidding!
But my "2-way monitor" days are over, since I can't live very long with any speaker or audio system that can't do the lower octaves well, at least down to the mid-20Hz range and reasonably loud & accurate. After you've owned subs like the REL's, Entec's, and Kinergetic's, you kinda get that way. 😉
But with these MB2's, they'll utterly blow you out of the room with their subtlety, accuracy, and when needed - the sheer pristine air pressure they'll throw at you at high dB levels, including in the low bass range. They don't even hint at power compression, image or soundstage congestion, or spectral tilt at any power level I've given them thus far. I'm telling you, with 600W/4 ohms per side of high-current Krell juice from 380Hz down, and 110 WPC of seriously good tube power (415 joules per channel!) above 380Hz - you'll be looking to get as aerodynamic as you can when this thing is cranking. 😄 😎
pedaler -
Even a lifetime warranty is pretty useless if the unit doesn't please you sonically in the first place. Besides, most of the "high-end" mfg's I've dealt with over the years have no problem if/when it comes time for repair.
I'll give you one example: when I had the Martin-Logan CLS IIa e-stat's, I was driving them with these ARC Classic 120's. Well, the CLS IIa was a tough impedance/phase angle to drive, going down to about .5 ohm in the high freqs. That caused a lot of tube oscillation with the KT-88's in the 120's, and consequently I was prematurely blowing tubes.
Since the 120's have 8x KT-88 per amp, that's 16 power tubes to replace, and at the time they were going for $65.-70. each! So I called Leonard at Audio Research, ostensibly just to ask him what I could do with the bias settings, or perhaps some different 6550-type tubes that would better handle the CLS' killer impedance. See, I didn't want to sell the M-L's because when things were going right between them and the 120's, it was one of the best speaker/amp combos I'd ever heard.
I had bought the 120's pre-owned, so by then they were OOW. Didn't matter to Leonard tho' - he sent me 16 brand-new 88's FREE :eek: and said after I go through them, call him back and he'd send more!! Eventually, I did sell the M-L's due to the ongoing tube maintenance. Those speakers really needed an arc-welder like the Krell's, but the Krell's had a very tough act to follow sonically. 🙁
