Pass Aleph-3 questions


I have a Aleph-3 and it gets bright in the upper mids at high volume.I believe it may be clipping.I have tried just about everything to tame it.My conclussion is its clipping.Anyone ever experienced this? Has anyone used 2 Aleph-3's? If so,what were the sonic differences between 1 amp compared to 2? Thanks!
david99

Showing 4 responses by sean

Your simply running out of steam and need more amplifier. It takes current to produce large quantities of bass. Once the amplifier is saturated, it will not be able to reproduce the current demanding bass as easily as it can the non-current demanding mids and treble. The end result is exactly what your experiencing, thinning out at higher volumes. On top of this, clipping causes an immeasurable amount of harmonic content to be generated, causing even more mid and high frequency energy to be passed onto the speakers. This is the reason that "clipping" burns out tweeters. They are simply seeing a far higher ratio of energy than they would under normal listening conditions.

If your driving your Aleph 3 this hard, adding another will NOT be enough to do the job correctly unless you ran them as monoblocks. Quite honestly, i don't know if those can be easily converted or not. Even if they could, i don't think that it would give you everything that your looking for. In effect, you would really need to at least quadruple your power in order to maintain a reasonable amount of headroom IN MY OPINION. If you REALLY like this amp and want to keep it, you might want to think about using it for the top end and picking up a similar ( larger ) amp and going into active bi-amplification. That is, if your speakers will support something like that. While this could become pretty costly, especially if you went with another "beefier" Aleph model, it would be about the only way to maintain the same sonic signature while avoiding clipping or "thinning" at high volumes. Sean
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If your listening to rock and "metal" with 92 db speakers, 200 wpc is not enough to REALLY "jam". You've got the wrong amp for what your trying to do. Sean
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David, all i can tell you is that if you think 200 wpc is overkill with reasonably efficient speakers for doing "metal" volume levels, you better never come to my house for a "jam session". Just "shows to go ya" that everybody has different ideas about what is loud, quiet, smooth, bright, warm, dark, clean, etc... Keep in mind that a power rating means nothing if the speakers are reactive at all. Some amps, even though rated for "brute strength" in terms of rms power, just don't deal well with anything but an easy load. The Bryston 4B that i had was like that along with a few other "respectable" amps. Gutless wonders when it came to low impedance / low sensitivity loads. While none of Nelson's amps fall into that category (in my opinion & experience), they are by no means "earth shaking" by any stretch of the imagination. Sean
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Something has come up in this thread that i want to discuss, but it is of another subject matter. As such, i'm going to follow my own advice and start a new thread so that we can stay "on topic" here. Sean
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