Current Questions

See?

The Force be with you....all beyond that is all the fiddly bits to Nirvana, although I prefer Enigma...*G*

It's easier to think about it in terms of energy storage than volts and current. The more energy an amplifier stores, the more current can be drawn from it. It is similar in concept to an electrical outlet for a speaker to "plug into".

An electrical outlet will give as much current as the load demands. If you took a piece of wire and shorted a wall outlet, the wire will burn (as well as the wires in the wall) if there was no circuit breaker. If you use the same wire to short a 9-volt battery, nothing happens. Ohm's law can explain the wall outlet, but not the battery. If the wire has a resistance of a tenth of an ohm, the current drawn from the wall outlet is 120 volts divided by a tenth ohm, or 1200 amps, which is lots of current. However, Ohms law says that same wire will draw 90 amps from the 9-volt battery (9 divided by a tenth). No way that will ever happen, a 9-volt battery will max out to half an amp. That limitation is because the battery does not store a lot of energy. The energy storage for the wall outlet is the transformer on the utility pole, which has tens of thousands times more energy than the battery and therefore can easily supply very high short circuit current. 

An amplifier is an energy storage device due to the power supply transformer and filter capacitors. The amplifier power rating at different impedances is a direct measure of the energy storage capability -- the higher the power rating, the more energy is stored, and the more the ability to deliver current to the speakers when the speaker impedance drop demands it .

The correlation I have is from car audio, where you must somehow grab as much current as possible from a 12v system. The alternator in your vehicle may provide a bit more voltage like 13v. A capacitor or ‘cap’ can placed in the current supply to suck up as much current as possible, so it can discharge it to the amplifier on demand. When you see the terms ‘high current amplifier’, the power supply of these amps is like a big capacitor for the energy needed to drive the speakers in momentary high demand situations. When I look at a toroidal power supply I see a big thing that holds a lot of juice. 

When I look at a toroidal power supply I see a big thing that holds a lot of juice. 

What you should see is a transformer that keeps the magnetic filed inside.

It holds no juices.

GS5 etc.,

your answer begins to explain why high current amplifiers tend to cost more and are less commonly found in mid-fi…they require larger transformers and more storage capacity.  I believe Krell was first to go for broke in this area. How does this all apply in the world of class D?  Maybe it was Bob Carver whose cube amp broke this open by generating high current capacity without big storage?