You have to realise that not all readers have a brain the size of a planet, and that when writing for a non-specialist readership some shortcuts will be made in order to explain the principle of what we are saying.
Poor journalism? I don't think so - which of these gets the story from yesterday over more immediately to a non-specialist readership?
"CHANCELLOR Alistair Darling hammered the nation with painful tax hikes yesterday to pay for the gaping black hole in Britain's finances."
Or
"The chancellor gambled on a rapid economic recovery and took an axe to his public spending plans as projected government borrowing surged to a peacetime record"
Anyway, to return to the matter in hand...
We could quote the entire Adam Audio explanation, which is that
"
In recent years amplifier technology has experienced its second big
change after going from tubes to transistors some 40 years ago.
You can still find semiconductors in this new generation of amplifiers,
but the signals to be amplified are treated in a completely new
and different way.
"PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) - sometimes referred to as Class D
amplification in contrast to the normal A or AB transistor amplifiers,
and sometimes called Switching Amp Technology - converts the incoming
signal to a series of rectangular waveforms of equal height. The
width of the rectangles varies in time and the relation of the width
of the rectangles represents the musical signal. This waveform can
be amplified much more simply, as the transistors are not modulated
anymore; instead they are used as switches that only turn the power
supply voltage on and off. In the case of a single sine wave this
looks as follows:
Even a very fast mechanical switch could do the job, but power
transistors turn out to be a better choice for the task, so PWM
amplifiers still look pretty much like the classic Class AB designs.
Important note: there are no bits and bytes involved, so "Digital
Amplifier" is a misleading description of the principle.
"The main advantage of PWM amplifiers is their extremely high efficiency
(>90%). As a consequence the heat to be dissipated is only one
fifth of earlier designs, leading to much lower temperatures within
the amps and making the use of heat sinks obsolete.
This principle has been known for decades, but time was needed to
develop units that are at the leading edge in sonic reproduction
quality and that still have the high efficiency mentioned previously.
"The ADAM units presented here use the new technology for both the
amp and the power supply section (i.e. no more transformers) and
combine it with state of the art input and filter sections to achieve
the best in multichannel active studio monitoring."
Or we could take lengthy quotes as to how the speakers' underlying technology is designed from the ICEPower papers, but I suspect that would send the majority of readers to sleep while pleasing only a few propellerheads, while most are more interested in how the product performs and our opinion of it. That's why they buy the magazine.
But anyway, have fun with your tricks and traps. Glad they keep you happy.
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