Bob Carver did some experements years ago on this subject.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
robertbartsch
Krunche:
...good idea to have a thread on different amps, I suppose.
Anyway, I've owned dozens of amps both tube and SS over the years. When I was looking for a large amp for a current system speaker build, I stated here that, in the past, I have placed a fair amount of reliance on the published THD stats and that I considered these to be indicative of how conservative a manufacturor rates their amps.
Surprisingly, I learned that most here consider the THD rating of limited use since, according to many here, humans cannot distinguish between amps that have .1% or less THD.
Anyway, based on that advice, in part, I bought a couple of new big Crown SS amps that l enjoy much.
Bob also found out that once the amp distortion gets below .1% that it gets increasingly harder to hear.
About a year ago people started complaining about the sound in one of the production studios here at the radio station. The studio has JBL 4412A speakers. I listened to the sound in the studio and something had changed!
There was a fuzziness to the sound, a low level distortion. The people said the speakers were bad, I doubted that it was the speakers. After checking out some things I figured out it was the old Crown DC300, I swapped it out with a different amp, sound was clean again.
I took the DC300 to the shop and hooked it up, put 8 ohm resistors on and put a 1khz sine wave in, hooked up a scope. What I saw on the scope just blew my mind! On the left channel the positive half of the sine wave was clipped about half way up, but the negative part of the sine wave was OK.
On the right channel the negative part of the sine was was clipped and the positive part was OK. This is very high amplitude distortion, but it didn't sound terrible, just kinda fuzzy. From what I saw on the scope I though it should have sounded much worse than it did! :biting:
For years I have know that speaker distortion is usually much higher than amp distortion. The reason that we love JBL is because of their low distortion. This experience has reinforced my conclusion that the quality of the speakers is far more important than the amp. I don't get hung up on amps. I use good amps but I don't go crazy over them, JBL speakers,YES!:D
I not putting down any one for their like or dislike of any brand of amp. John