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woodbino said:
There lies the trickery and all the magic. It's not as simple as a lightbulb switch - Working/Not Working.
The power output capabilities of past and present power amplifiers have been based, not on acoustic requirements, but on electro-economic considerations. Today's low-efficiency loudspeakers in a room of typical size would require several kilowatts of input power in order to produce (dissipation allowing) the greatest sound-pressure peaks that can occur in live musical performance. Clearly the larger the amplifier, other things being equal, the more faithful the sound. By delivering the maximum output power reasonably obtainable with today's semiconductor power technology, the DC-300 delivers a previously unattainable level of fidelity.
Since it is inevitable that a power amplifier smaller than several kilowatts will be overloaded from time to time when driving low-efficiency speakers at high volume, overload recovery must be instantaneous and free from subsequent thumps or distortion. The DC-300's totally DC-coupled design is unequalled in this respect.
Dynamically, the DC-300 is, as far as we know, without peer. Its ultra-low distortion required the development of an ultra-low-residual IM meter (less than 0.005%) to allow for actual measurement of distortion at levels down to 10 milliwatts output. (Harmonic analyzers are not sensitive enough.) The oommon practice of measuring IM down to no lower than 1 watt is not an adequate test for crossover notch distortion, as large amounts of IM are often produced between 10mW and 1W, while distortion above 1W is acceptably low. It is the DC-300'S extremely low distortion below 1W, plus its very low hum and noise, that make it sound so outstandingly good at low listening levels.
Incidentally, its noise is so low (typically 115dB below 150W into 8 ohms) that special voltmeters having a full-scale sensitivity of 100 microvolts had to be built in order to allow meaningful production-line testing of the amplifier.—Crown
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/crown-dc-300-power-amplifier#pdJRp51y0p40WYe9.99
Ever heard of the expression "this amplifier sounds more powerful than its declared X watts"? Sometimes its input sensitivity trickery, but sometimes it's Overload Recovery Performance exceeding the norm, especially in 4ohms and bellow territory. Translating engineering to psychoacoustics and vice versa goes down the rabbit hole where most of us hobbyists and even engineers get lost.
Let's compare the TOTL Kenwood Model 600 to the lowly Technics SU-7700 currenlty pushing my 4 ohms towers. In addition see the Overload performance graph of the reviewed Amcron (Crown).
Kenwood has more power, bigger PSU yet it collapses on lower impedances. Overload performance is terrible. Why? Bad design.
Hi Vlad, long time...
Obviously determines what we here, recording, mastering, ripping all have an effect, usually a pretty big one.
Recently I have found that the ripping quality on Spotify can be variable, nominally 320kbits/sec Ogg vorbis it sounds to me as if some tracks/albums are actually at lower bitrates, hard to be sure but the same version of the same track can sound better from different sources.
Next time I find an obvious example I will flag it up.
Elswhere... Back in the day, around '75-'76, I had around a dozen DC300 amplifiers running one of my (largely) JBL 'bin and horn' rigs. They were pretty old and tired by then, the replacement DC300A had been out for several years and the DC300s were being phased out.
I have recounted the story of how a spare DC300 saved a Motorhead gig in Paris by doing emergency duty as a power supply for our FOH Midas console. Interestingly my sound engineer recons the console/rig, never sounded better.
Obviously determines what we here, recording, mastering, ripping all have an effect, usually a pretty big one.
Recently I have found that the ripping quality on Spotify can be variable, nominally 320kbits/sec Ogg vorbis it sounds to me as if some tracks/albums are actually at lower bitrates, hard to be sure but the same version of the same track can sound better from different sources.
Next time I find an obvious example I will flag it up.
Elswhere... Back in the day, around '75-'76, I had around a dozen DC300 amplifiers running one of my (largely) JBL 'bin and horn' rigs. They were pretty old and tired by then, the replacement DC300A had been out for several years and the DC300s were being phased out.
I have recounted the story of how a spare DC300 saved a Motorhead gig in Paris by doing emergency duty as a power supply for our FOH Midas console. Interestingly my sound engineer recons the console/rig, never sounded better.
davedotco said:
I remember reading about that. Simple and robust rarely fails it seems.
I copy-pasted Crowns comment specifically for the Overload Recovery factor as important feature. Interesting how this was measured in old Hi-Fi Choice (?) reviews back in the 70s. Never seen it elswhere.
Macspur said:
I have Tidal on my DS so don't know if it works the same....but an even dafter question - you haven't chosen "Play Later" on the selected album, which just adds it to the playlist?
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