opaqueice;172020 Wrote: > Sorry - these are amplitude measurements, not power? In that case take > the square root of what I said. Picking a tube amp at random: > > http://stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/306yamamoto/index3.html > > you see that the distortion into 8 Ohms at .1W is .5%, and 3% at 1W. > Compare that to the A500, which is .09% at .1W, and around .05% at a > watt. So it's better by a factor of 5 even at very low power, and by > more than a factor of 50 at one watt. That's not particularly good for > a SS amp, I agree, but it's still much smaller than is typical for tubes > - and of course the amp is capable of much, much higher power output. > > EDIT - why is it the amplitude of the harmonic distortion that's > plotted here? Isn't the power a more relevant statistic for what we > hear? If so, my original figures are more or less correct, at least at > a few watts.
I'm not really up for a full explanation/investigation. Let's just say that a tube amp that is rated in the 10s of watts, being driven into soft-limiting is going to generate loads of distortion. It is meaningless to compare distortion figures at similar power levels between such totally different designs since the tube amp would be used with extremely sensitive speakers. I'm sure the Behringer would sound pretty awful playing into such sensitive speakers, wheras the tube amp would sound very nice indeed as there is no increased distortion for low level signals. (Also realise that if 1/10 of a watt is used, a lot of the signal will be much further down yet in level. How would that sound with 70's style transistor radio type crossover distortion?) -- P Floding ------------------------------------------------------------------------ P Floding's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2932 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31843 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
