Gregadd, where are you getting these specs? They are not part of the specs listed by Lamm for the ML-3 Signature amp I thought we were talking about. In any event, voltage x current will always equal watts.
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Gregadd, where are you getting these specs? They are not part of the specs listed by Lamm for the ML-3 Signature amp I thought we were talking about. In any event, voltage x current will always equal watts.
In my opinion, a well-designed amplifier will sound basically like itself no matter what real-world speaker you power with it. Some audiophiles like the kind of amps Karsten makes precisely because they sound different in different systems driving different speakers. The mix and match gives audiophiles something to do and makes them think they are discovering some magic combinations. In fact they are just hearing the amp change its distortion characteristics and its frequency response. A solid state amp with lots of current and voltage capability--and thus lots of watts into any real-world speaker impedance--and which has a decently high input impedance and quite low output impedance will be fairly immune to changing its stripes, no matter what is feeding it and what it is feeding.
So you're saying that the speaker design and crossover has no effect on the sound of the amplifier? There might be a few speakers with a relatively consistent load, but I don't think that's true for the vast majority.
And I think theory and practice here are two separate issues.
I am not sure that is what Tom said. A point to which I subscribe: Amplifiers with Low output impedance and large current capacity.. The one who simulate ideal Voltage sources... sound like THEMSELVES in most speakers .. The load the speaker present has little to no influence on such amplifiers ...
Frantz
You have to keep in mind something here. P=I x E. SS amps tend to have much lower rail voltages than tube amps but higher current. Tube amps have lower current but much higher B+ than SS. David Manley postulated that you can hear the effects of the high B+ voltage of tube amps. Frantz is also right when he says that tube amps clip more gracefully than SS. Tube amps tend to compress the top of the waveform whereas SS will just clip the top off and sound nasty as hell doing it
No I read it that all amplifiers operated within their specs sound the same. And what does sound like THEMSELVES exactly mean?
So are you saying that there's no difference in the performance and sound of the top of the line solid-state amplifiers from Burmester, Rowland, Krell, Spectral, Mark Levinson, Soulution, etc. solid-state amplifiers - even if feedback will affect the amplifier's performance as noted by Ralph in his post.
Or build these amplifiers with shoddy parts in them but still have the same specs and they will still sound the same?
Miles, "a straight wire with gain", don't you remember it anymore?
Assuming that the sinergy between an amplifier and a speaker can be modeled simply analysing the output electrical parameters of the amplifier and the impedance of the loudspeaker is an oversimplification.
Unless you have an obvious mismatch such as current limitation or ringing effects, that simply rule out the combination, the problem is much more complicated.
Myles
I would be the last person to affirm that all amplifiers sound the same. We would have reach perfection if it were so... I do believe, well have experienced that Voltage SOurce -Type amplifiers.. most of those SS when confronted with a speaker tend to sound their OWN same way, meaning that the Krell would sound like a Krell whether you confront it with a MBL 101, and Harbeth , a Quad , A Wilson ... It is likely to continue doing its thing, i-e sounding like a Krell with what we have come to expect from the Krell sound, similar but vastly different from ML, Rowland or Plinius... You confront a low power SET with an MBL 101 or an Apogee Scintilla ... it is likely to not sound very good at any volume resembling live ... It will not sound like a SET...
I do not like to hijack a thread but it is important to understand why the low output impedance is a desirable quality in an amp. Most transducers work both ways.. IOW if you push a speaker diaphragm, it creates electricity. This can be easily measured with a Voltmeter. Simple experience, Disconnect your amp put a Voltmeter at your speaker terminal and push the diaphragm of any of the drivers, preferably the woofer.. You will see voltage ... Now when the speaker plays, this voltage, continues to exist but now in opposition with what the amp produces .. You need to get it out of the way.. Amplifiers with Low output impedance virtually short this EMF, such is the measure of the damping factor.. The ratio of the speaker impedance to the Amplifier impedance at a given frequency. So given an amp with 0.05 Ohms of output impedance at a given frequency the damping factor for a speaker that would have say 20 ohms at that frequency remains a serious 400 160 with a speaker that would say dive to 4 ohms at the same frequency the damping factor remains still respectable at 80 .. if you have an amp with 1 ohms the maths tells you quickly that your damping factor is on the very uncomfortable range between 4 and 20 .. Guess which amplifier exerts a better control on the speaker both subjectively (aurally) and on paper ? ... We are seeing now Tube amplifiers with low output impedance and they are less "bothered" by speakers impedance. back in the days there were quite a number of 16 ohms nominal speakers .. There are may reasons why they have virtually disappeared this could be the subject of another thread ...
So to come back to my point and likely Tom's .. Amplifiers do sound different but Voltage Source amplifiers ( Low output impedance, substantial power) are likely to sound in character when driving speakers with different impedance or even speakers with widely varying impedance
Physics is right there , all the time however much we argue, this is textbook electrical circuits ... on which our audio systems are based, they don't (and can't) bend the laws of physics; they simply abide to them .. Call it physics if you want, call it theory, It is Science and basic understanding and application of it can only serve us to come closer to our goals as audiophiles.
Frantz
I would be the last person to affirm that all amplifiers sound the same. We would have reach perfection if it were so... I do believe, well have experienced that Voltage SOurce -Type amplifiers.. most of those SS when confronted with a speaker tend to sound their OWN same way, meaning that the Krell would sound like a Krell whether you confront it with a MBL 101, and Harbeth , a Quad , A Wilson ... It is likely to continue doing its thing, i-e sounding like a Krell with what we have come to expect from the Krell sound, similar but vastly different from ML, Rowland or Plinius... You confront a low power SET with an MBL 101 or an Apogee Scintilla ... it is likely to not sound very good at any volume resembling live ... It will not sound like a SET...
I do not like to hijack a thread but it is important to understand why the low output impedance is a desirable quality in an amp. Most transducers work both ways.. IOW if you push a speaker diaphragm, it creates electricity. This can be easily measured with a Voltmeter. Simple experience, Disconnect your amp put a Voltmeter at your speaker terminal and push the diaphragm of any of the drivers, preferably the woofer.. You will see voltage ... Now when the speaker plays, this voltage, continues to exist but now in opposition with what the amp produces .. You need to get it out of the way.. Amplifiers with Low output impedance virtually short this EMF, such is the measure of the damping factor.. The ratio of the speaker impedance to the Amplifier impedance at a given frequency. So given an amp with 0.05 Ohms of output impedance at a given frequency the damping factor for a speaker that would have say 20 ohms at that frequency remains a serious 400 160 with a speaker that would say dive to 4 ohms at the same frequency the damping factor remains still respectable at 80 .. if you have an amp with 1 ohms the maths tells you quickly that your damping factor is on the very uncomfortable range between 4 and 20 .. Guess which amplifier exerts a better control on the speaker both subjectively (aurally) and on paper ? ... We are seeing now Tube amplifiers with low output impedance and they are less "bothered" by speakers impedance. back in the days there were quite a number of 16 ohms nominal speakers .. There are may reasons why they have virtually disappeared this could be the subject of another thread ...
So to come back to my point and likely Tom's .. Amplifiers do sound different but Voltage Source amplifiers ( Low output impedance, substantial power) are likely to sound in character when driving speakers with different impedance or even speakers with widely varying impedance
Physics is right there , all the time however much we argue, this is textbook electrical circuits ... on which our audio systems are based, they don't (and can't) bend the laws of physics; they simply abide to them .. Call it physics if you want, call it theory, It is Science and basic understanding and application of it can only serve us to come closer to our goals as audiophiles.
Frantz
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Myles, if the amplifier meets my conditions of being solid state and having high current, high voltage, thus a lot of available watts and be able to "double down" in power, with vanishingly low distortion of all measurable types over a bandwidth well exceeding the audio bandwidth, has an output impedance of .2 ohm or less, and an input impedance of, say 500 kohms or more, it probably will not have "shoddy parts" in it. I'm not saying that all such amps will sound the same. I do not think it is beyond the ken of amp designers to voice even such an amplifier a bit or more this way or that. I'm also not saying that nothing else besides these factors determine the sound of an amp. What I AM saying is that such an amp should have a consistent sonic signature from system to system, largely independent of what speaker it is driving and what equipment is driving that amp.
One determinant of differences in amp sound will still be raw frequency response. Even solid state amps with low output impedance do not measure exactly flat into a dummy speaker load--check Stererophile's amp measurements. And they don't all have exactly the same non-flat response. The threshold of hearing wideband differences in frequency response is 0.2 dB or less. Thus, if any two amps vary in frequency response by that amount or more over a significant bandwidth, most listeners should be able to reliably hear the difference between such amps on the basis of raw frequency response alone when used with a particular speaker.
OK you've explained more fully your statement since that's not how I originally read it.
And if that is the case, then speaker cables shouldn't affect the sound of an amplifier either?
I used to be much more concerned about wires than I am today. At line level, it can easily be shown that high capacitance cables can roll off both bass and highs, but high-cap interconnects are fairly common and some of the most expensive interconnects and speaker cables have those network boxes which contain various values of lumped capacitance, inductance, and resistance. Sure, those wires will sound different.
But I've found that if interconnects are mechanically well assembled and fit connections correctly and have low capacitance, there is really not very much difference among them--not enough to make me want to spend hundreds or more per meter at least. And I've found that in the analog realm using balanced connections further minimizes audible cable differences. An exception is digital audio links where transmission line effects come into play. There I hear definite differences and have definite preferences. The Apogee Wyde-Eye A/D is a very good value, I think, for such an application, at least in the lengths I've tried.
As to speaker cables, I prefer the sound of the ones with low resistance and fairly low capacitance and inductance. My current favorite is garden variety Belden 10-2 twisted pair cable sold by Blue Jeans, used unterminated except for ProGold spray. To me it sounds at least as good as any other speaker cable I've tried and better than most. I prefer no terminations because bad terminations, especially if corroded, can act as rectifiers and introduce distortion. Not terminating the cable and treating the cable ends with a corrosion inhibitor like ProGold will eliminate potential sources of such distortion.
If the speaker cables are short and heavy gauge, they should not add enough resistance/impedance to change the effective output impedance of the amp and thus should not change the frequency response of the amp. A long thin gauge cable might be a different story.
The other two lumped electrical parameters of a wire are capacitance and inductance. Capacitance should not be an issue with most modern amps which have some sort of output network or other circuitry to avoid oscillating in the face of highly capacitive loads. You may remember the problems that the highly capacitive Polk Audio Cobra Cable caused for certain amps back at the beginning of the high-end speaker cable era.
While actual amp oscillation SHOULD be a thing of the past, it is generally believed that not all amps are really comfortable driving highly capacitive electrostatic speakers and a highly capacitive speaker cable presents the same sort of potential issue. I think I hear audible problems with speaker cables having extremely high capacitance, at least with the amps I've used. These cables will generally be those which have the absolute lowest inductance, such as those where the positive and negative strands are interwoven, are arranged in concentric tubes, or are flat and separated by only a minute bit of insulation. As a general rule, to me such cables sound bright in a gritty, irritating way.
At the impedances faced in speaker wire, speaker cable inductance is definitely a factor which can affect an amp's sound. Greater inductance will modify the high frequency response of an amp. The farther apart the positive and negative runs of the speaker cable are on average, the greater the inductance. Parallel conductors with a lot of "land" between the conductors will have high inductance.
The flattest, most extended high frequency response will occur when inductance is held to near zero, but, as I said above I do not really like the sound of such cables with amps I've used. There are definitely audible high frequency differences between even garden-variety wire laid in parallel runs vs. the same wire in twisted pairs or the same gauge in flat wires very close together or in an interwoven Litz or concentric arrangement. Thus, differences in inductance alone or a combination of inductance/capacitance can cause audible differences among speaker cables. I prefer the sound of moderately low inductance of twisted pair speaker cables.
Skin effect might be able to cause differences in high frequency response if the effective gauge of the wire is large enough and the wire is long enough. I have not seen any reported evidence of frequency response differences caused by wire factors such as the type or purity of metal, the number of boundary junctions between metal crystals, dielectric type, direct current biasing, or any other factor trumpeted by cable companies as important. None of these factors seem to significantly affect the lumped electrical parameters of a cable, which factors can measurably be shown to determine potential frequency response of the amp/cable/speaker combination.
Frequency response may not be only factor to cable sound, but most controlled blind tests of the audibility of this or that come down to frequency response changes as the overwhelmingly important factor. Usually, if something is reliably audible in a blind test, it is because of some sort of frequency response change between A and B which exceeds the threshold of hearing. Mundane maybe, but it seems to be true, even with a complex device like a speaker. See, for example, the Gradient Absolute Listening Test.
I agree strongly about speakers and the room contributing the most, around 90%. I think it's unfortunate that the trend overall is to focus so much energy on the least significant aspects of a reproduction system, while ignoring some of the most significant areas. Modest electronics paired with high quality speakers in a well designed and treated room can yield an exceptional result. However, a more typical scenario is to use high quality electonics with speakers that pay no real attention to room interaction. That system is then placed into a living room with no treatment at all. Often this system will cost a lot more and the owner has adjusted to their room sound. They unconsciously "listen through" the problems. However, after some time with a well sorted room, it becomes harder to listen through. In the past, I preferred open baffle systems in an untreated room, with monopole bass and EQ, but I didn't know what I didn't know!
Unhappily "a well designed and treated room" is something even more subjective than the sound of cables ...
And , unless you accept to listen in a dedicated, non domestic environment, can be very expensive.
I think you have to look at the difference between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. I think the subconscious mind is the area that we need to fulfill when we listen to music. Things like image specificity, etc. have to do more with the conscious mind. With this in mind(which mind?), I believe the source is the most important part when listening to music.
I might just rephrase that quote from 2 posts ago:
"Correctly and fully sorted out, modest electronics paired with reasonable quality speakers in a normal room can yield an exceptional result."
Frank
"Correctly and fully sorted out, modest electronics paired with reasonable quality speakers in a normal room can yield an exceptional result."
Frank
The problem is that modest electronics can’t be “correctly and fully sorted out” because:
A. No one knows what the hell that really means.
B. Modest electronics will sound modest becaused they were designed to sound modest.
Taking a cheap amp and soldering the power cord to the wall socket and well as soldering the speaker cables directly to the output devices won’t change the intrinsic quality of the amplifier.
Fair enough in one sense, but not in another. What it means is all the weakness have to be eliminated. What are the weaknesses? That depends on every, individual situation. You want your car to do a hundred miles an hour, but it can't. How do you fix it? By spending a lot of money and sticking it a much bigger engine. Or having someone modify your engine. Or spending a lot of money improving the wind resistance by changing the body shape. Or by fixing the real problem, which is that the brakes were sticking! Every, every situation is different because hifi gear is quite a complicated combination of electronics and there are no easy answers. If there were, they would have been found a long time ago ...
So soldering things MIGHT help a great deal, in other setups it may have almost no impact. As far as intrinsic quality goes, I would guarantee that everyone's system here, properly debugged, would blow their minds in terms of sound quality ...
Frank
The reason is that I still don't know what "properly debugged" is completely, from the point of view of identifying all the weaknesses! This is still a learning exercise for me, but one thing I have learnt is that it is a step by step process, to pinpoint where there are problems, and that the problems change depending on many different things. The exact same system may perform better or worse depending on what's in the environment, the only way to "debug" it is to try things, otherwise you are largely working blind!
As an example, I suggested at one point you eliminate the pre-amp to see what difference that makes to the sound, but you weren't interested in doing that. That was an excellent opportunity for you to learn more about your system, to give you extra clues about where there may be problems, or perhaps that there are none there. But unless you're prepared to try things like that, you'll never understand the angle that I'm coming from ...
Frank
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