£1000 receiver

[deany]

hi as any one any idea on the ratio of money spent on amplification in a modern day £1000 receiver. the yamaha rxa-1060 for eg

 

[deany]

can anyone please advise

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Don't buy into either the sticker / box claims of "one point twenty one gigawatts of power" or the quoted watts per channel. AVR manufacturers claims are notoriously, uh, "ambitious".

Moreover, you're not really likely to hear any difference in actual sound "loudidity" between, say, 100 watts and 120. Someone in an anorak will correct me if I'm wrong but I think you need something like double the power output to achieve just a 3dB increase in "loudidity".

Concentrate instead on what the watts sound like, not how many there are.

 

[Son_of_SJ]

hi as any one any idea on the ratio of money spent on amplification in a modern day £1000 receiver. the yamaha rxa-1060 for eg

The ratio of money to ... what???

 

[Son_of_SJ]

Moreover, you're not really likely to hear any difference in actual sound "loudidity" between, say, 100 watts and 120. Someone in an anorak will correct me if I'm wrong but I think you need something like double the power output to achieve just a 3dB increase in "loudidity".

You are not wrong. And a 3dB increase in power is quite easy to miss if you are not paying attention. To achieve a doubling in subjective loudness, you need to increase the power by a factor of 10.

 

[deany]

didnt think this was a hard question to get to grips with. on a £1000 receiver how much of the £1000 is spent on the amplification.

 

[Vladimir]

Two important bottlenecks for a typical class AB amplifier are 1) the power supply PSU and 2) cooling facilities.

What you get in your sub 1K receiver is the PSU of a typical stereo integrated amp with 20,000-30,000uF caps, 300-500VA transformer. This is good enough for 50-80W continuous on 2 channels, 20Hz-20kHz @<1% THD. The heatsink in budget receivers is more or less same size as in a 50-80W stereo integrated amp.

However, they stack more output transistors to get more channels (5, 7...) on the same heatsink, powered by the same PSU as for stereo only. If you use it with only 2 channels, you are fine, no different than using a normal stereo integrated. The rest of the channels output devices are turned off and wont suck power from the PSU and generate heat. At this point there is no reason why AVR 7.1 should perform worse than 2.0 stereo amp. But for surround sound you may get clipping and overheating if pushing too hard simply because your 7 channel receiver amplification was built to a price of a 2 channel.

This is why when you look at receiver specs, look for continuous power on all channels, 20Hz-20kHz @<1% THD. Not peak power, not 1 channel driven, not 1kHz, not 10% THD.

 

[Vladimir]

didnt think this was a hard question to get to grips with. on a £1000 receiver how much of the £1000 is spent on the amplification.

£200-£300