What is wrong with negative feedback?

Is the 115dB at a mid-hall seat, or is that the level on the stage? Apparent sound levels in a concert hall are far more influenced by the indirect sound level than in the home environment. This is due to the enormous difference in volume between a concert hall and a normal audiophile listening room (say 200-300 cubic meters vs. 20,000-30,000 cubic meters). In a home environment you listen to predominately direct sound that has nor been tonally shaped (highs rolled off) and homogenized by a concert hall volume of space. Hence it sounds louder than the exact same measured SPL in a concert hall. It really has nothing to do with amplifier design.

The Bel Canto ref1000m2 Icepower Class D amps I am using on my larger full range OHM Walsh omnis seem to be able to go as loud as desired without an edge on most good recordings.

These amps are high damping factor which matches well to the OHMs, so I suspect there is NF applied, but not sure. If loudness cues are more present as a result, I'm not sure that it is significant enough to matter.

I also use Triangle and Dynaudio monitors on teh same system. Monitors in general will not fare as well with orchestral music at high volumes (at least not without a sub of some sort to offload much of the work), so I can say that the speakers are definitely a factor as well.

Ralph Atmosphere said, " A typical orchestra can do 115db with ease, yet many audiophiles will not turn up the volume past 95 db because its 'too damn loud' or they get 'turn that @#$% down!' from their S.O. This mostly due to artificial loudness cues which are totally coming from distorted odd ordered harmonics, and by that I mean only 100ths of a percent."

I ask do you listen to your system at this level?

Bob

"These amps are high damping factor which matches well to the OHMs, so I suspect there is NF applied, but not sure"

Mapman - Not only NFB is applied but it is mulitiple (two) called Mulivariable Enhanced Cascade Control. It is in the Karsten Nielsen doctorate work available on the web (Icepower). Feedback doesn't have to be deep since class D amp has inherently low output impedance even without feedback. Speaker is always connected to +Vs and GND and only direction changes (very low resistance Mosfet Bridge). Output impedance increases with frequency but DF is still about 1000 at 1kHz.

A few years ago, we had a regular and good contributor (be nice if he came back) Ar t an amp designer, suggested that in his typical ss designs he would try to keep NF to a minimum, but in his switching amps though there was much more NF, it didn't seem to be an issue. I wonder if it was due to the NF in the switching amps occurring at a faster rate?