P Floding;172026 Wrote: > 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?)
My question was just why amplitude and not power - I would guess that human perception of distortion scales more closely with the power than with the amplitude, but perhaps that's wrong. I don't understand what you're saying in your post. That tube amp has 5 times more distortion amplitude (-45dB), or 25 times more distortion power, at 1/10 of a watt. Extrapolating the A500 distortion (which is quite linear on the log-log plot from a few watts down) to lower power, to get to -45dB you'd have to go down another three orders of magnitude. So at .0001 W the two distortions would be comparable, assuming the tube amp curve stays flat. I doubt even the most sensitive speakers are going to make much noise at that level. Therefore into any speakers the A500 has significantly lower distortion, so I don't see why you think it would sound bad. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 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
