Amplifier Paradox…and more!

Thanks @tksteingraber, @atmasphere, and @ditusa for the great information in this thread and some great links!

@atmasphere Wrote:

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. 

I agree!

Damping Factor Debate 1967 see here and here

Mike

@gs5556 You can also flip it and ask which speaker do you recommend for this amplifier. I always select the amplifier first and then the speaker. In either case though, one could easily also ask the manufacturer who should be able to give a recommendation based on testing their designs with a variety of components (or at least they should be doing that). 

But one should not have to understand the inner workings of amplifiers to begin with. There are so many amplifiers with so many different specs on the market that the only way to choose one is to ask a question: "Which amplifier do you recommend for these speakers in this size room listening to this kind of music at this kind of volume level"

The answer to that question can be most helpfully provided by a brick and mortar audio dealer. 

@atmasphere Thanks for this useful information. "its the distortion signature of the amp that governs how it 'sounds.' That is literally the differences you hear in amps,"

It seems that this truth is often overlooked or misunderstood.

@atmasphere Thank you for your comments/corrections.  That’s why we love having experts like you to help steer us in the right direction.  This hobby has endless learning opportunities.  

I will believe Atmasphere correction  over a general article about amplifiers.

Thanks to him for the corrections.

@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. 

Interesting article.

But remember that  if you cannot replace a high end  amplifier impactfull qualities and working parameters by a high end  controlled speakers/room, you cannot replace the qualitative impact  of even a low cost well controlled speakers/room by an amplifier at any price... All parameters  matter, not only electrical one but acoustical one also even to evaluate the system/room...

The choice of amplifier is just one piece of knowledge and not the most important so important it was...

Then the most underestimated factor is not the amplifier it is acoustics parameters and knowledge...

«We can see the amplifier, but we dont see the sound waves interpretative results by our brain, only felt them, it is why an amplifier choice and price matter most for most people than acoustics concepts»--- Anonymus acoustician

Great article. I have only owned a measly four amps in my time, but each one had it’s own signature.