[nightanole]

Well since MisterX and AMB have replied, my say is mute.

Ok In your world sound gets converted into 1&0's and put on a cd. Its then taken off the cd, ran through a digital to analog converter, and then the voltage is amplified and sent to a speaker. Your problem is you vastly oversimplified your problem.

In your world, the sound is recorded perfectly, converted to 1&0's perfectly, and converted back to sound and the voltage is amplified to power a perfect speaker.


I guess your argument holds alittle truth if the said speaker was a pure resistor and the signal never changed and was like say 60hz. Then all of these amps would basicly be just playing back and ac single into a light bulb, and the only diff between them would be how bright it got.

Theres alot more to an amp then just distortion numbers and watts. If that werent the case then all tube amps would be worthless. The amp has to also control the speaker and force it to do what it wants, and also reject all outside interference. A lower end amp might hiss more, or not beable to control the bass very well on a very reactive load speaker. a lower end amp and a higher end one might play the same freq at the same voltage just the same. Then try to vary the freq and voltage quickly, the lower end one wont keep up and will get muddy.

This is very simplified and odds are the wrong way to describe technical terms but i gave it a shot. To sum it up:

You act like a amp just needs to be a power supply, and a speaker is just a load/resistor. This is horribly incorrect.
An amps distortion and watts numbers have very little to do with how good it is.


PS: headphones are hyper sensitive compared to normal speakers. They are the most unforgiving sound makers out there so there is a reason why there are amps out there the size of a shoe box and only put out 2 watts...

 

[Guild]

Quote:

Originally Posted by amb /img/forum/go_quote.gif Of course not. I repeat again... those specs are useful, but they are not the only ones that matter. There are so many other aspects to an amplifier's performance it would take a book to write about them (and there are some good books out there, as are whitepapers and other material on the 'net). And like many things in life, some of these are biased or controversial, and we're not going to solve those puzzles in this thread.

Would you mind linking to just one or two of these, if you have them bookmarked? I'm a curious mind, as is the OP it seems.

thanks

 

[CodeToad]

Quote:

Your problem is you vastly oversimplified your problem.

Thanks for explaining. All I'm asking for is a simplified explanation of the problem that amp designers face so that I can better grasp what it is we're after here.

 

[MrSlim]

Besides the measurement specs you posted, there are two physical aspects of any amplifier design that can greatly influence their "sound", damping factor and current output. Damping factor is the ratio of the amp's output impedance to the impedance of the device it is driving (ie loudspeaker or headphone). The larger the damping factor of the amp, the more capable it is of "controlling" the movement of the speaker or headphone transducer (speaker cone), thus more accurately re-creating the original sound that was recorded and stored as an electrical signal. If you look at the Mini3, M3 and B22 respectively, their output impedances are .1 , .05 and .01 ohms respectively. Theory says that given a fixed device impedance (say 32 ohms) that means that the M3 has twice the damping factor of the Mini3 and the B22 has five times the damping factor of the M3. Combining the output capabilites of each amp, again respectively .3W, 1.8W and 5.6W at 32 ohms of each device you see that the B22 should be considerably more capable of controlling the sound transducer, and thus creating a more accurate representation of the sound (given a perfect transducer, which does not exist)..
Headphone amp design is complicated by the problem that the impedance of many of the best headphones are all over the map, from 32 to 600 ohms.
As well, the particular efficiency of the headphone also has to be taken into account. So, a headphone amp could drive a pair of 600 ohm headphones quite well, because its output current capabilities and its output impedance are sufficient for those headphones, but a pair of better quality headphones that have a much lower impedance (AKG K701's for instance are around 55 ohms) will sound like crap.

 

[amb]

I don't have my bookmarks handy at the moment, but illustrious audio gurus such as Nelson Pass, John Curl, Erno Borbely, Walt Jung, Douglas Self, amongst many others have written good articles or books on amplifier design. Some are available over the 'net, some had been printed in magazines or other journals (such as from AES). They don't all agree on everything, nor do I with them, but they are good and thought-provoking. Differences in each designer's findings/opinions/focus/style is what gives their work "character".