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Originally Posted by Drag0n /img/forum/go_quote.gif
When you get your way and all amp builders start making their amps with a gain of 3, someone will complain these amps aint worth crap and dont amplify enough.
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Indeed, that is the problem. Sometime in there where the knob is parked also became associated with power which is another thing going against building a low-gain amp. It dosnt matter that the buffer you are running your headphones off of can put 3W into 8ohms... what matters is that you have to spin it bast half knob to get grados to hit 90db and 2/3 of the way up to get senns to go there.
FWIW, 3 is about my upper limit for gain, and I am particularly fond of much less when I can do it. 1 or 2 more than covers my low output phono stage well enough for any can I own, and has enough room on the low end for my sensitive headphones with a 2v source.
I once built an amp with gain of-20 db (thats right, 1/10) that some people actually enjoyed listening to. They stopped liking it once they found out that the gain was less than 1.
Quote:
| I want amps to have alot of gain, and just have a switch for different levels, or maybe a dial on the inside for a master gain control, then a master gain control on the outside. |
Depending how its done, gain switches can reallllly suck.
There are 2 ways to do it.
The first is to adjust feedback around the amp to reduce the gain of the actual electronics. This is spiffy but brings some problems. The first issue is that the switches necessary to control the gain may cause some instability in the amp regardless of the gain. The second problem is that most amplifiers with feedback are not stable below a certain gain. Maybe you need less gain than this...
Option 2 is to build the electronics with gain of about the maximum you anticipate needing, and then adjust the range of the volume control with various resistor networks. This is a bandaid fix at best. you still have all the noise from high gain electronics, and depending on the amp the bandwidth from that too.
The fact is that most people dont even need gain as high as 4. Is every volume control between the source and the load all the way up? (some people have 2 volume controls in their system{including digital controls}, which is the pinnacle of retardation) NO, they are not all maxed? you dont need as much gain as you have.
Continuing my first line above, most people would (incorrectly) infer that since the knob is further down in the "high gain" settings above that the amp is more powerful. Not so! in example one, with less gain often gets more power because there is more feedback, at the worst its the same! In example 2 there is no difference except in the mind.
