2. amps-preamps
  3. 1038620469

Riddle me this...

Why is it that you cannot seem to purchase a lower-powered solid state amp any more? None of the “names” in solid state amps seem to make any reasonably priced or powered products at all, and most haven’t since about the early 90s. (A few come to mind right off, Levinson no. 29, Rowland Model 1, Krell KSA-80, the family of Pass Alephs). These days, the most modest offering from any of these companies (not to mention everyone else) is many times more expensive, in no small part due to the fact that they are all many times more powerful.

Question is, why? Why should I need 250wpc+ to drive any reasonably designed speaker? What is it about the industry that seems to be in a conspiracy (or, at least, conscious parallelism, for you antitrust geeks) to foist more and more power on the consuming public while, at the same time, doubling or tripling prices for their most modest gear? Why is it that, if I want a really nice amp at less than 100wpc, I have to either go with tubes or with gear that was made at least a decade ago? Why is it that most speakers made these days are either “tube friendly” or “require” an amp with enough power to light a small village to actually go?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got inefficient speakers and a 250wpc amp which I like the sound of just fine. It just strikes me as preposterous that I (and we, if I may speak for the market) seem to have been conditioned to believe that this is necessary. Why on Earth wouldn’t someone get a reasonably designed, efficient pair of speakers and, say, a Pass Aleph amp for a negligible fraction of ANYTHING built by Pass these days and never look back? I understand there are plenty of legit reasons why more power can be desirable (“never can have too much” yea, yea, I know), but am a bit miffed that, legit reasons or no, the market no longer seems to offer choices. We a bunch of suckers, or what? (Yea, a bit of a rant, but this has been bugging me -- am I the only one? Did I miss something? Can I get a witness?)
mezmo

Showing 2 responses by gregm

gregm
3,396 posts
 
Trelja paints the picture of our reality I think. For the rest Twl & Sean have explained a good deal, in a complementary way. From a historical perspective, the "golden age" of audio sprang from the growth of the recorded medium dominating the music market after WW2. In classical this was very much the case for Europe: orchestras were disparaged during the war, people could not flood the concert halls and the proliferation of recorded music brought the symphony orchestra, based many miles away, to the home. BUT this necessitated equipment in order to listen, better equip to listen better, etc. Remember, entertainment in the old times was radio & the local concert venue -- and the little TV offered little to the music public. PLUS stereo flourished, and made reproduction even more difficult than it had been.

Nowadays, who cares apart from us....
gregm
3,396 posts
 
Sean- for that matter, can we have efficient FULL-RANGE speakers w/out lots of compromise? Compromise that we pay for elsewhere (i.e. amplification, active subs)? I think that the "speaker + sub" scenario typifies it: we need two separate speaker transducers to even APPROACH full-range reproduction. Or, we have to turn to giga$ speakers, some of which incorporate the "sub" part... which of course requires bi-amping at least. I.e. it's not only the watts in one main amp its also often necessary to have TWO amps, even if the one of the two amps comes with the speaker set (but we pay for it, don't we?).
Three of us experimented with a pair of Avanti -- trying to get "the last ounce" of sound out of it. The best result we could achieve required $20k of amplification + another 7k of branded speaker cable. Spare change.

And, what about the upper register -- the harmonics going beyond that 20kHz standard? How much of that can we normally reproduce through our speakers? Despite the wide-band electronics that are available & hi-rez sources, and s/ware that is supposedly available? Little, I bet...

It seems that the kind of reproduction we are driving for here is an excercise in inefficiency -- in a grand scale.
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