If i had the money.....

1 - I do not have faith in technical stats given by a manufacturer about amplifiers. It is sort of like looking at stats of a NFL playoff game... The only thing that matters is what team wins. The only thing that matters is how the amp sounds.

2 - I have little faith in any review that is published for any product. Stereophile has LOVED other products in the past that I have not liked a lot myself. They have also loved products I have loved, but now days they seem to love nearly everything they review.

3 - I would never say that I want a product until I have heard it of better yet demoed it.

4 - Power means NOTHING when judging an amps sound quality. These amps may be able to drive any speaker on the planet, but that tells me little about the way they sound. I'd take LAMM M1.1 monoblocks over about any amps I have ever heard, and they were designed in the early 90's. Not to mention that their stats are only so-so, but they are some of the best sounding amps on the planet (many publications agree by the way... ). They do put out 200wpc CLASS A power into 4 ohms! Not too many amps can match that stat. Somehow, I doubt much of the Parasound power is CLASS A.

Anyway, it is nice you are excited about an amp you have never heard but you have heard good buzz about. However, I do not beleive the buzz until I hear for myself.

Another point: To get every ounce of performance from these amps you would have to put them on two separate 30 amp circuits (yes 30 AMPS!). If one was driving a seriously innefficient speaker that had an impediance between 1 and 2 ohms (cannot think of one that is this inefficient off the top of my head...) in a big room, you could trip a 20 amp circuit with just one amp. Food for thought.....

KF

Oops, ERATA, I mistakenly wrote the LAMMS do 200wpc CLASS A into 4 ohms. LAMM owners only wish, heh heh...

You are right Frank, The LAMMs do 100wpc pure CLASS A into 4 ohms. That is still pretty amazing since most amps cut actual Class A Power by about 75% if ohms are decreased by half. Thus if a typical amp is 100wpc Class A into 8 ohms, the amp would be effectively 25wpc class A into 4 ohms (the rest of the power would be AB).

Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.

KF

Sean,

Check out the specs of most tube amps.... If they even list them........ If one was to try to interpret them, they would probably think they sound absolutely horrible compared to most solid state amps.

My theory is that the specifications of an amplifier give you a very general idea (and I do mean general idea) of how much power it has, and what kind of speaker it can drive.

Everything else should be to your ear.

KF

Rcrump,

I was just stating that stats on amps are misleading. As you reinforced with your response to my previous post. Different types of distortion can mean different things to one's ears.

However, I will still maintain that stats can be very misleading while many times having little to do with how an amplifier sounds. I am sure you are familiar with the THD wars in the 80's when the theory was that the least Total Harmonic Distortion was BEST. This THD war was nonsense.

Anyway, I can look at stats all day in a magazine about amps and really have no idea on how those amps will sound in my system. Too many stats are misleading at best. For example the 'dampening factor' stat. This stat is touted by many amp designers; however, measuring dampening factor is something else entirely. The stat itself varies with the length of speaker cable you are running. Thus if you want more 'damping factor' you do the measurement with a shorter run of speaker cable.

KF

Tweety, in probably less than a year these amps will probably be on the used market for between $3k and $4k. So if you can wait until a magazine declares some new greatest flavors of the month, and people get a handle on the sound of these amps (and decide if it is or is not what they are looking for), you will probably be able to pick these up for a good price used.

Sean, great composers and musicians can see the music on a page, and instantly hear it in their heads. I do not have this talent. And I sure cannot look at any specs of an amp on a written page and translate them into the sound of an amplifier, especially how it will sound in my given system. Sean, if you can do this, more power to you. I cannot. To me, this makes specifications worthless. This does not even take into consideration the fact that the specifications may be WRONG or MISLEADING. This is knowlege that you are being fed by someone else, and many times it is the manufacturer. I am not going to say that all manufacturer specs are wrong or misleading, but as with ANY information put out by a manufacturer (of Hifi magazine), the specs must be taken with a grain of salt. This is much like audio reviews. Specs can be fudged, or made to look better than they really are (through omission) or even mislead by emphasize different things.

Anyway, the only thing I fully trust is my ear. And sometimes I ask for a second opinion from a friend's ear if I have a question or need to confirm something.

KF