@tksteingraber This article is full of misinformation.
I’ll point out a few:
Class A designs are known for sweetness and warmth, Class AB offers a balance of power and finesse, and modern Class D amps bring speed and efficiency without the sterility of early designs.
The truth is the class of operation has little to do with its ’sound’. You can have a class D amp that is as ’sweet and warm’ as a class A amp and that is true of AB amps as well. Any class of operation can yield an amp with ’a balance of power and finesse’. So this bit is literally a red herring.
A high damping factor means tight, fast bass that keeps pace with the music’s demands. A low damping factor can result in a sense of sluggishness in the lowest frequencies on up into the mids, even if everything else is functioning correctly.
This statement is false. For starters, no speaker made needs more than a 20:1 damping factor and many offered to high end need considerably less (such as open baffle designs). You can have an amp that sounds very fast yet has a low damping factor and it can have quite a lot of impact in the bottom end.
Current, not just watts, is what lets an amp take control.
I put the bit about damping factor first so you can see the fallacy in the above statement. Current and power are mathematically related by the formula
P = I x V where P is power in Watts, I is current in amps and V is Volts, so 1 Watt equals one Amp times 1 Volt.
What we see here is that if the amp has the power to drive a low impedance speaker, the amperage will be the result of the Voltage made into the load and the amplifier will not be overloaded.
The bottom line is you can’t have current without Voltage. So if you have 200 Watts playing into a 4 Ohm load like a Magnaplanar, the resulting current is 7.07 Amps. A tube amp of enough power can do that no worries.
Amplifiers shape tone in a way that’s subtle but unmistakable, influencing the color, texture, and emotional weight of your system.
What he does not say and does not seem to grasp in this bit is that its the distortion signature of the amp that governs how it ’sounds’. That is literally the differences you hear in amps. Its caused by the same function of the ear that allows you to hear the difference in quality of a Stradivarius vs a country fiddle.
Two amps with nearly identical specifications can sound vastly different in a real-world system.
What he does not get is that we’ve had the technology (thank-you, Audio Precision) for about 30 years now to allow us to measure the differences we hear in various amps. Most of those measurements don’t get made or their implications are not explained or understood even by those making the measurements. But if you have all the measurements then you can predict how the amp will sound if you understand how the ear converts distortion into tonality.
This guy is literally writing as if measurement technique has not progressed at all since the 1980s, while somehow the rest of the electronics industry has :)
Enough for now. This article is puff piece and for the most part is not informative.