What Specs Really Matter in Audio Amplifiers?

[Music] all right my friends we are back on a live stream it's late it's almost midnight but you know what no time is too late for the guys that we got here we got don dunn of 80 20 20. jackson good friend and we got anthony gramani man where have you been not worthy where have you been i've been to south america i've been to territo fuego and backman on a bicycle no welcome back my friend to the show that never ends good to have you back today we are going to be talking about amplifier specs what's important in them what to look for how is this going to determine the experience you're going to get in your home theater i've done tons of videos about measurements of amplifiers but we don't know always talk about the exact specs of it and how to look at how to look at what the manufacturers back in because it's not always apples to apples and that's the biggest problem in this industry is it lacks standards so you could get an amplifier that looks like it may have good specs but you got to read the fine print and we got to know what these specs mean and and how they're going to ultimately change the enjoyment or the experience in your room with your speakers and your room acoustics and your listening habits right and there's more there's not just the specs that they show you on the normal stuff and there's a whole bunch of other functional space or what i call behavioral specs that matter for your enjoyment let me introduce that let's say you have an amplifier that produces an input to out signal it's perfect but because it's got a heat reliability issue it shuts down in the loud portions of your movie or your music that's not useful and so we're going to cover like the broad array of all that stuff that matters so we have a slide presentation i want to go over it to you but i wanted to show you some measurements that i've i've put up over here i'm going to share my screen real quick and just talk to you guys just to kind of wet your whistle here on what we're going to be covering so i pulled up um a couple of reviews some of them are old but they still show telling things here do you see my um my screen now with the yamaha yeah so this is an older yamaha aventage receiver it's one of their low end ones i think it's like an 800 unit it's the rxa 860. and you can see here the this is the preamp outputs and this is what i found um most receivers if you drive them past a volt and a half even though the preamp isn't clipping the power amplifiers are clipping and if you're not using those power amplifiers it's still corrupting the preamp outputs and you see this fft this is a bad measurement so if you're driving a if you're trying to reach maximum gain out of an amplifier it takes at least two volts rms to get maximum gain out of an amplifier that has an av of 29 db and you know if it's a thx kind of gain structure so even before gain structure actually right that's like the most classic input to output gain 28 x which is 29 db yeah exactly so you're looking at this yamaha receiver which people are going to say well if it doesn't have a good enough amp section i could use the preamp outputs well look at this thing at 1.6 volts you got only about 50 db of between the fundamental and the third harmonic that's not great now that that was an entry level model too gene it was but it but at the point of the matter is it matters i'm trying to show why things can sound different see at a volt it's okay at a volt it's actually behave that's a really good measurement you're 100 db below the fundamental that's inaudible anything in my opinion below 60 db below the fundamental is pretty inaudible right so let me interrupt you you said that's a bad measurement that was a good measurement on your part that's a measurement of bad performance right right exactly yeah and i'm going to also help people who are watching it's like that's a measurement of distortion uh just so you know 40 decibels down means the distortion is at one percent if you did the math of decimals and 60 db down is at 0.1 now somewhere between 0.1 and 1 you start to hear you actually start to notice it's getting hardened it's getting not good and really what matters the most in terms that sound of like yeah it doesn't sound very clean is not necessarily the first or second or third spikes that are to the right of the main signal but it's to start stuff that's further up because you hear that better there's there's a better separation in frequencies and you notice that as crud it just it's just like i don't know i just turned it up and it sounds harsh yeah exactly there's no need for that that's just a that's just bad there's a whole bunch of ways to design that bad it shouldn't matter it's just don't do that so here's another thing that you'll never find on a spec sheet and this is a problem more with receivers than dedicated amplifiers is there i call it nanny control it's the it's the input it's the circuits inside the receiver that thermally limits so it doesn't generate too much heat and it doesn't shut the receiver down or it doesn't damage the output devices i've never seen a receiver and i'm not trying to beat up on yamaha because they make some great products right but i've never seen a receiver do this where as the power is going up it's going up it's distorting them bam look at that it's limiting the power and it's bringing it back here later yeah yeah so that's something like that in my opinion if you're slamming some bass or you're doing some really dynamic program material it wouldn't be impossible for this uh limiting circuit to click in and it could be causing some compression in your signal when you're listening to music at loud levels yeah so that's that's an interesting thing to show um if we start talking about class d amplifiers they're they're a lot better these days than they were back in 2009 but here's an example of a class d amplifier that didn't have a good feedback topology and if you put a load on it that was if you put an open circuit on it you get massive frequency peaking and the output characteristic of that amplifier the frequency response would change depending on the load so you could have some speakers that sound good with this amplifier some speakers that don't sound good with this amplifier because the amplifier's behavior changes with load impedance right that's not good you want it to be you want to be independent of of the low of of the of typical reasonable load impedances yeah exactly now that doesn't just and this wasn't a cheap product but here's another an example of a product that's very expensive an 11 000 pass lab amplifier which everybody claims is audiophile and i do like the sound of their amplifier when i measured this amp when i listened to this amplifier i liked it but i did notice it was a more forward sounding amplifier than the class a amplifier that i had and then i started doing ffts and here you go look at how look at how the fft's behavior this is not state of the art in my opinion your dc offset's high on it i mean there's just it's not a stellar measurement and this is a company that doesn't believe in using a lot of feedback yeah that's a classic audiophile thing is low feedback um again for those of you who don't know if ft just means it's a spectrum analysis using fast fourier transform methodology it's just a way to to look in the frequency domain you put a signal in um what you should get out is that signal and most electronics are going to have some side effects and they all want to be below threshold of audibility and it's a fair amount of the the upper and audiophile stuff that's like i don't care as long as it sounds good i'm happy and you know that's one philosophy um and then you get down to like what do you hear i guarantee that all those harmonics of the original signal that are actually adding distortion their pollution the original signal on some program material will be audible um first as just harshness and then later if you listen carefully to certain instruments you're gonna go that just sounds dirty it doesn't sound like a clean flute or a clean saxophone um can't do that not okay so someone has a super chat here they have a pair of sound amplifier that's rated at 250 watts thanks for the super chat how do i determine the max output um well that depends on a lot of things and we could talk about this and i was talking to anthony about this the other day so if you've got an amplifier that has one large centralized power supply and it has two five seven channels and they tell you it's 200 watts times seven so with that large power supply if you're only driving one channel it's not atypical for that channel to put out a good 300 watts rms unclipped just because you have a larger central power supply that it could pull from and has more reserves and that's why it's always an advantageous to have one big power supply and then have you know multiple channels feed off of it as opposed to monoblocks where you have a try and transformer for each channel never like that approach yes having a big central power supply in my opinion is better so so the question here is it only mentions 250 rms by the way power rms if you actually look at the math of it makes no sense what it means there's no such thing yeah is the the maximum voltage measured rms root mean square that you can get into a certain load eight ohms four ohms two ohms who knows let's say most cases it's an eight ohm load um and then and it says 60 amperes peak that means that somehow one channel of the thing has the ability to feed up to 60 amperes into a load which is enormous those are usually those are bogus specs usually those are like for a millisecond on tuesday when it's driving a very specific 0.1 ohm like a rethinking of what we've been saying in our industry what you want to know is your speaker needs so many volts to be able to produce certain sound pressure level how many volts can you put in the speaker given that it's a certain load that's been measured in watts but what's this confusing i've always been confused by watts because it depends on what frequency you're at so i'm going to talk about some stuff that you will see sometimes and you'll see more in in the near future i'll explain why but so the the question is how do i tell my maximum output on my power sound amp first of all parasol makes great apps richard tramplo if you're listening great great bunch of guys um and how how can you tell well is it single channel driven two channels driven amp the the amperage at output doesn't really tell you anything because what you need in a power amp is volts and amperes i'm going to explain that a little later but ultimately a power amps their role is to be able to take the signal on the input amplifi raise its voltage up typically by 29 db which which happens to be 28.28 times more than the input deliver that into a load and then feed enough current which is electrons actually you know pulling electrons out pushing positive signals in which you can't do um enough so that there's enough current to do that whatever that needs and so if you did the math and you said okay well this is supposed to be a 250 watt amp it's like 44 volts rms 44 volts so 44 volts into 8 ohms quick v squared over r 44 volts anybody have a calculator there yep i got it oh oh gene's calculating so 45 hp oh nice a real calculator on his phone on my phone because my hp died and somebody told me to download the app so i'm happy i got my hp back so if that's 45 volts rms then you got to do the square root of two times that it really gives you 63 volts peak is is the kind of voltage you're getting at that rating but like i said that that amp probably does 300 watts so take the square of that and divide by eight tell me how many amps that is oh okay so you want 54. i could do that too here but i don't have my real calculator i have one of these things and i always make mistakes make mistakes when i press numbers on my iphone maybe it's time for a little chocolate time for it it's the time for you i think it's time for uganda you you gonna go nice so we're talking about you got me all messed up now with this chocolate now i don't have any chocolate here and i'm feeling i'm feeling left out mm-hmm okay gene all right so you're looking at about five almost 5.6 amps that's it yeah so that's a funny thing and that's usually right fine by the time you get to six or seven amps you've like driven most speakers into like crazy mode so what you're gonna do with 60 amps well what they designed is an amp with lots of output devices that if you need it for a short amount of time downhill on a short super short peak you can deliver up to 60 amps peak without the output device going yep okay you're never going to use that that's like having a really huge bottle of bourbon huge enormous and you only need to like drink for one night okay so you got a gallon of bourbon are you going to drink all that in one night i hope not um if you're don you might don i hope you don't drink a gallon of bourbon ambulances i almost didn't feel like that question was a plant because there's a point where we're going to talk about something thanks for your question you need enough amps to drive the volts you need into the load you need and it enables 21 gigawatts of watts um so in an 8 ohm load that was what did you say 6 amps in a 4 ohm loads that would be 12 amps and a 2 ohm load that would be 24 amps so and if you have speakers that are lower load than 2 ohms something else is wrong you have a bad speaker at that point they don't know how to do it yeah my experience with aerosound is they always have plenty of low i mean they've just got tons of power plenty of current so to be fair if any of you guys are in the car audio business that are listening is because audioholics doesn't limit to theater this thing in car audio it's not uncommon to do really low impedance speakers so that the 12 volts you got to start with can actually produce watts so you know there's no reason why you couldn't do a 0.5 ohm or 0.1 ohm speaker as long as you had an amp that could deliver into that load and the funny thing about that is i learned this the hard way growing up is i would take this the oem speakers out of the car and put new ones in i put some new polks or new jbl's and they would not play loud enough with the car amp right because yeah yep they impedance in most car speakers so there there are yeah there are some i forget who it was um it's okay to name names right yeah yeah so i remember years ago bose had you know some speakers in some car when i worked at dolby and their impedance was actually point either 0.3 or 0.4 ohms you go wow that's pretty crazy well you know you're starting with 12 volts only so with a smaller voltage swing you can get a lot more power into 0.1 ohms as long as it's all designed for that yeah so long discussion thank you for your question all right well let's get down to the live stream we are in the live stream i mean the uh powerpoint powerpoint so um actually gene any way to keep our our our faces along with the point but there it is you know what to do with specifications power amplifiers there we go so because you want to talk with your hands i gotta talk with my hands and and i gotta see i see i gotta see what dawn's gonna have i gotta check that dawn's not gonna drink a whole gallon of bourbon there oh i'm not wondering oh just three fingers for this that's it three fingers is all it takes okay um so um so there it is so what do all these specs mean you know you pick up a manufacturer's spec sheet and there's all these numbers um and i'm i'm working on a committee within cedia the custom electronics design and installation association which is all the the tech heads that do custom install of high-end audio video theaters and stuff to come up with you know big thumbs up to come up with actually a standardized specification list no judgment just like let's everybody let's measure all the things the same way and let's put them all in the same place so when you look at documents from different manufacturers you can compare things equally it's called the performance facts program and it's modeled in a way after the nutritional facts program you you pick up any item of food in the u.s or in china or in belgium and there's these same data points that can tell you whether this is good for you to eat or not so um about me do i need to introduce whatever i have three companies brownie systems makes cool speakers pmi engineering designs cool rooms sonata's acoustics is good acoustical treatments gene you're going to put some of those up in your room i think sometime soon i'm planning it real soon yes i'm a c i have a bs in ee electrical engineer just just like gene right we're both bullshitters of electrical engineering around electrical engineering all the time we're gonna do that today again uh i spent five years at dolby ten years at thx 22 years ago i left all of that comfort to be my own boss and have freedom to work like even late like here um so all together in this industry i've had 36 years of fun and i look forward to many more of that i'm a cdf fellow i've made top instructor at cedia hey yes members i got a bunch of patents i got two kids um i play guitar and saxophone i have an airplane a old british morris eight car bicycles and many other toys i think the coolest thing on your resume is you have an airplane that's tony stark level stuff and you're devastatingly handsome i mean and those two things and five bucks will buy you a cappuccino that's right nice that's right i've tried going to starbucks go i have an airplane can i get a cappuccino like that's five bucks um all right so warning this is going to get technical this is not a kind of a soft topic we're going to go hey it's good to have a nice looking app we're going to get kind of down and dirty here so in the agenda what are these specs for how did they evolve if we have time we'll talk about like you know why is it that people measure the stuff this way it's like well it's just sort of historically what's happened um and so what are these specs which ones which ones are really audible so there's a bunch of specs you can see out there from manufacturers i'm going to mention an example years ago there was this thing called tim transient intermodulation distortion do you remember those yes that's in phone systems uh we were doing tim's stuff all the time for dsl communications yeah right so there there is a per no names a person came up with the fact that that was really important in power amps and suddenly it was all the rage to talk about that you know that's gone and it's like well yeah maybe theoretically whatever but it was not an issue so let's not worry about all of the specs that are not an issue we're going to cover the things that do matter and some of the specs out there you could academically start you know getting better and better numbers for the sake of specimen ship like distortion down to point zero zero zero one percent yeah dude once it's once you're below point one let's say you've got a decent product even at point five you could say you don't hear it and if you're going to start to spend a bunch of money so that the numbers keep looking better but it doesn't improve your performance who cares right and to add to that i see some of these amplifiers like the benchmark for example that are like point zero zero zero one like the lowest distortion amplifier on the market which is great i mean on a measurement standpoint that's awesome but think about it if that amp is four or five thousand dollars and you need a lot more power than it could provide is it better to have that super super low distortion amplifier that you can't hear that distortion anyway or is it better to get an amp that has twice the distortion which is well below threshold but has three or four times the power and you need that for your dynamics of your system right and now we get into this like core issue of engineering which is there is no perfect engineering there's engineering to a set of compromises you know it's the best engineering is the one where you've looked at all the things you got to worry about and gotten the best compromise so if you need enough output voltage and power to drive all of your speakers to get to a certain sound pressure level and uh and you can get good low enough distortion go for that if you go well you know i don't really need that much sound pressure level i don't like to listen very loud but i like the theory of keeping uh having a design that's completely transparent why not spend the money on a super super low distortion amplifier even though that may not make a difference whatever you know so which ones cost that's not a typo mucho dolares um so dolores or dolores actually has like i call it which is pain uh dollars like sometimes you're paying money for things that don't matter so what's an amp to do so this is a little bit of electrical engineering ready ready ready so an amp is normally shown as a triangle you know sort of the the in the engineering specs that that that triangle represents a thing that a signal goes in and it comes out with more either voltage or current or both so you could have a voltage amplifier that doesn't amplify current that's not a power amp it's just a voltage amp you could even you're going to have a uh an amplifier that increases amperes without change current without changing uh voltage that's not a power that's a that's a transconductance amplifier um or you have what we're interested in which is a device in which you can put a hundred millivolts in on the on the input which would be the typical level coming off of a preamp or a processor some you know regular source device um this little thing that looks like a little lollipop is actually the power supply there's there's actually dc volts controlling all this maybe plus and minus 50 volts or 60 volts whatever um and then on the output most amplifiers are going to turn 100 millivolts into 2.8 volts that's a really common gain it's a game of 28 um it's actually 28.28 and it's 29 decibels if you do the math of that and that thing needs to drive a load and the load can be modeled as a resistor but a resistor that has a little arrow on it that changes with frequency it's a variable resistor very very few speakers that are declared as 8 ohms really are eight ohms that means that the average uh is eight ohms or that the minimum is no less than six point six point four ohms by the way by by law but they change with frequency so an amplifier has to amplify voltage it needs to amplify current by the way the the current going in here is microamps nothing but you need to deliver enough current so that whatever this voltage is you can drive this load and we just did a quick calculation of what it takes to do a watt amplifier into a eight ohm load you found that was six amps right gene i was like i was like five or something yeah something like that five point something five yeah if it was a four ohm load it'd be ten or eleven amps if it was a two ohm load it'd be twenty 22 amps uh which is 22 amps is pretty significant anyway because it amplifies both voltage and current it's a power amp that's sort of where that work came from you know like the history because it it on the way in it's funny there's no power going in it's voltage but you're turning it into something that has volts and also can drive a lot of electrons down here which is current it's called a power amp um now along the way that thing should not change the signal in any other way it should just change the voltage from 100 millivolts to 2.8 volts and the current from micro amps into 5 10 20 amps and nothing else whatever you put in should come out without any change and that's the ideal amplifier and all amplifiers are going to change it a little bit so question number one is where did this 100 millivolt become 2.8 volts who decided that what rule you know which moses came down the the mountain and said it will be 28 uh 28 x or 29 db a game 29 yeah that i know where's that i know that can't i know it came from thx originally i think oh long decades way before yeah but decades before that i know it worked so it's just one of those things like they say in that jazz song just one of those things um so first of all what's 2.8 volts it happens to be one watt into an eight ohm load right okay um and somewhere along the way it was sort of convenient to decide that when the input is full swing um the output would be full excuse me when when one volt is on the input the output should be full swing so a hundred watt amplifier at full swing puts out 28 volts right and years ago years ago years ago and you know there's pioneers pioneers in the industry like people who made these things way in the beginning when there's like nobody doing these webinars where people's like i think i want to make a thing that when i stick one volt in it puts out 100 watts and i'm going to propose this to my buddies in the industry and we're all going to agree to it so an agreement from i'm going to say 40 years ago or 45 years ago a standard a practice was that an amplifier would have enough gain so that one volt on the input caused clip on the output or was right on the edge of clip so yeah one volt goes in 28 volt goes out if you go to 1.1 you're clipping the output clipping mean it can't go no more instead of a wave being nice and even the top is chopped off like right at the head and at the chin um and at 200 watt amp or 200 watt amps which is around 40 volts man i'm having a blank on that one volt in would put out 40 volts out um 200 what i am 3db higher something like that um and so on and so forth who decided that i know some people i'm i'm sure there's somebody who's listening goes oh that was blah blah blah who came up with that well i think part of it is too is if you put too much gain you get you amplify noise so maybe that was a happy medium correct yeah you got thermal noise and you got gain noise so the idea was can we make a pre-amplifier that doesn't have to have a really big big uh power supply that can put out enough voltage so in the gain structure the next thing doesn't have to have too much gain and it was just sort of a nice easy convenient thing and yeah if you had to gain by the way there's no reason and other than noise there's no reason an amplifier could not put up put in 100 millivolts and put out 10 volts right and there are some amps that have gain controls on them you can crank all the way up and they will do that but what happens then is your preamp your device before you're going to keep the volume very low you'll never be able to turn it up to 11. so a quick funny story about that when i worked at raytheon back in the day i had to design a headset coupler that would take the plantronics headset which i hate that freaking thing because uh because of how antiquated it was and it would amplify the signal loud enough to work in this antiquated plantronics headset the game circuit had to be a gain of 4 000. you know how hard it is to make a gain that high without causing oscillation yikes i had to do crazy so that thing wouldn't oscillate i could sneeze in with oscillate and and it was noisy so i had to use active gain control to cut down the noise so there comes a point and that's beyond what we're doing here but just to let people know that if you add more voltage gain that's not necessarily a good thing because it amplifies noise and if you have a high sensitive speaker you're going to hear hiss you're going to hear his so this is this number uh this number i just want to bring up that some legacies came up with the fact that this is a convenient number and that's what you'll find now in the thx days uh when you know omen and i were working on this thing was like yeah let's just make 100 watt amp be the gain of 101 amp so gain of 28 let's put everybody on the same footing there's a slight change which is that rather than change the gain with the power of the amplifier it's always the same gain so that when you're going in the speaker always plays the right reference level a 200 watt amp would just play louder it would allow you to go up higher but without changing the volume knob so uh that's that's what an amp's got to do and along the way it may as well be reliable you know you don't want the thing breaking down all the time because you know you know when it's going to break down right when is it going to break down when you have guests over and you're and you're demoing correct after you've drunk that gallon of fruit yeah i can tell you exactly when it breaks down friday evening after everybody's went home exactly so freddie after everybody after all of dawn's people have gone home but when when when you guys are wanting to play it you you know have a few drinks with your buddies you crank it up that's when it's gonna like fry and then don has to answer the call and run over there well yeah yeah so listen i just want to say anthony when you're like oh when i was working with holmen i mean that's like the coolest thing ever dude you just casually say that i mean to an audio video nerd that's like oh wow yeah so quick we got a super chat from isaac is asking tell us about loaded variant amps that are five to seven channels yeah well i mean most class a b amps good ones are loaded variant that's the advantage they had over class d for many years but now we're seeing really good state-of-the-art class d amplifiers whether it's a purify amplifier from bruno puts these the hypix ones um even the latest ice modules pascal those are all pretty much load invariant amps these days meaning that no matter what load it's driving the frequency response of the amp remains the same which is a good thing that way it's always consistent and so when when you're saying load invariant do you mean that whether you're doing one or five channels driven it's it can always deliver 200 200 watts oh i thought he meant that the frequency response yeah yeah and it could be both right yeah that's a good point so yeah the power supply could give you tax down for sure and that's it if you want a five channel lamp that can deliver 100 watts you know out of five at the same time the power supply needs to be 500 watts which isn't that big but if well no it needs to be a lot bigger than that if it's a class a b amp it's got to be at least double that yeah yeah so um so actually actually this takes this this takes things off topic but it's important to mention the power consumption rating on the back of a receiver when you see when you buy a yamaha receiver and it says you know 600 watts and then people ridiculous saying well how could it be 600 watts when it's 100 times 11 well they don't rate it with all the channels driven at full power they actually rate it with all the channels at 1 8th power because 1 8 power is the most inefficient way to drive an amplifier and that's putting it like 25 efficient instead of 70 percent efficient when you're driving it near clipping so those power consumption rates on the back panel unless it says max power or not really max power and you have to design an amplifier so you have to design an amplifier that not only could deliver max power but also deliver sustained power at lower levels and not go into thermal runaway right because at the lower levels for class a b it's very inefficient and that's the huge advantage of class d why we should really be moving to class d because if you have a high channel density of an atmos system 12 13 to 26 channels we got to stop using class a b because that is just idling power all day long and it's a space heater and we need to move to something that's 90 percent efficient even at low power so the next thing on here was not b space heater i think i forgot an a serendipity right there the conversation is going great by the way if you guys ever think we have this prepared we don't this is i love these webinars because it's it's really a bunch of people chatting um and sometimes we'll disagree we'll agree to disagree sometimes it's just like yeah we're you know we're all going down the same place so let me talk a little bit about this heat stuff so when an amplifier is rated in terms of of its power there's a interesting regulation in the united states other countries may not be the same but in the united states you need to show the the either ul the ftc you know standards bodies that whatever you say this thing can do it can do it without thermally overheating at an eighth of that power so the test doesn't actually crank it up to 100 watts or 200 watts or 300 watts it's actually to say okay my amp goes to 200 watt to you know to whatever 40 volts output they check that that's the clipping and then they turn it down to 1 8 and you got to show that you can sustain that one-channel driven five-channel server and eight-channel whatever it is yeah without overheating and that's what gene is saying how how is it that you overheat at an eighth power what what's the deal so let me really quickly with this diagram without getting into a lecture on power amp design show you how that works so when you're at clip of an amplifier when you put let's just say let's keep talking about 100 watt amplifier when you're putting a volt in and you're getting 28 volts out the swing over here is essentially unattenuated by the output transistors essentially you're going in you're amplifying it and everything from the power supply is essentially going straight out not everything actually a good portion of it when you reduce the signal when you go to lower the only way that gets lower is the transistors are choking that signal the output devices are told by their by the base controls of them it's like okay we'll attenuate that that supply that me may be plus and minus 40 volts that's always going in on a regular class abm and the output devices the output transistors are pulling that down so you get some lower value it turns out that the you know if you did a heat bell curve when there's low voltage coming out of the amp there's not a lot of heat when there's high voltage coming out not a lot of heat it's like there's this place in between which is usually at an eighth of the rated power that the thing is really cooking and it turns out that most program material when you crank it up the peaks are here and the average is somewhere between 1 10 to 1 8. so i'm going to pull up a measurement for you keep talking i want i want to show you something that's interesting so this business about being a space heater is relevant and and like when when you're looking at the power consumption coming out of the wall it doesn't always match what you're pushing out into the speakers um class d amplifiers work completely differently the the middle part is the same but the power supply is actually modulating up and down with the signal there's actually a little you know a little detector circuits looking at the signal going through and changing the power supply so that it can track together with the output so you're never thinking that much the output devices are not working like giant resistors like brakes you know so imagine you're driving your car you got a foot on the accelerator foot on the brake to get it to stay at 50 miles per hour that's a great way to burn up your brakes and use up a lot of gas so instead you you have a thing called an accelerator you pull back on that and and that's the rails on the class d amplifier that are way more efficient if it's designed well it sounds great oh yeah you see the you see the chart i put up here yeah this is why at 1 8 power class a b amplifier is tortured right here you're down here to the 20 efficiency rating whereas a class d even at 1 8 power driven is almost is over 80 percent efficient right much different much different scenario especially when you have 11 to 13 or more channels right so what are the benefits of that added efficiency is less heat less power consumption of the wall so greener if you want to think of it that way you're not you know wasting a bunch of longevity that the devices don't always blow up and and potentially a more dynamic sound character because you you know you're not overheating these devices and the heat the hotter they get the less they have the ability to put out current stuff like that so um now i'll just mention this and we're going to come back to talk about that it used to be that class d amps did not sound that good agreed that's over okay i've listened to a lot of manufacturers class d amp topologies against really well known class a and class a b amplifiers you know sort of the darlings of the industry and it's like man it sounds every bit as good which is amazing there was a question earlier somebody asked if eventually most receivers will be class d and i responded probably most likely that's where it's going to go yeah so there's two reasons why they're not all class d right now and the biggest one that i understand from the japanese manufacturers i spoke to is it's all about perception um for years audio files would not go anything but class a right yeah it now class a b is the new class a like that's the old style that's the purest amplifier you can get with a high bias into class a class a b is the benchmark it's going to take years for really for people to adapt the fact that you can get as good sound as class d the other thing is it costs more money to make good class d over a class a b design and that's mostly because of the power supply because you could throw a linear supply on a class d amp which a lot of manufacturers do and there's some advantages to that because you get tend to have more headroom out of a big supply like that but it's not as efficient as doing a really good smps regulated smps that's the only time you want to regulate a power supply is when it's an smps not a linear because a linear will dissipate too much power through the regulators to do that but an smps is a totally different ball game but the best class d amplifiers use smps regulated and you're not going to get that in a 500 receiver right well let's see if we can change that perception you know there's another people there's enough people listening watching and hearing that may trust us they certainly trust don okay oh yeah absolutely and um to just go dude stop worrying about that our integration amps now you know since they're not necessarily a mainstream product they're all switching like that triad that yeah that's a great amp i mean it's it's a 1u and it has 16 channels of amplification and 50 watts bridgeable bridgeable original yeah 100 watts and four ohms it's a that's that's a mainstay now so it's just a matter of time i think until your mainstream receivers go that way in fact i've i've heard a rumor that the new integra receivers when they eventually come out their flagship models will all be class d i always trust don he's the only one drinking [Laughter] just three fingers man right oh so you're hearing the integral ones they're going classy i didn't hear that but i heard in the flagship models well that makes sense because pioneer is is class d so they're right here yeah yeah they're basically the same thing so so i use a there's this brand called powersoft again i hope it's okay to mention brands powersoft is the darling of the pro audio industry you know they're they're like the one that everybody like respects and it's all it's all a fancy version of digital switching class d amplifiers that are very well designed man those things sound amazing um and you know i i recently had an installation um actually i think i covered this in a residential systems article uh an installation where the the client had an audiophile amp wasn't sounding that good they badly needed equalization to get over some acoustical issues in the room and we proposed to switch from this i will go unnamed audio file expensive class a amplifier to a one you high class two channel class d with eq and could equalize things tune things tune in both the the time and frequency domain get everything to be time aligned correct all the stuff you do when you're doing a good job and i was like okay well listen to this and like oh my god that's a million times better and there it is a made for pro and commercial application switching supply class d amplifier that sounds amazing so you know if there's just one thing we you know my hope is that if in the slide stream we can convince anybody out there is like look at class d amps and stop worrying about what used to be a problem in the past so people don't like that look at the big monster amps though so you'll you'll make giant chassis with just a little bit of surgery in the bottom of them sure you can do that add some weights in there to make it work um um all right we're we're 40 minutes into this i i was telling gene we're probably going to take two or three sessions to get through this and and if it's okay it's okay i think i i'm really liking the fact that we're bantering and having good time um and i i did wish i had a drink i'm pretending to drink out of my usb speakers that well it was going to be one either wine or bourbon you know it sounds like a bourbon night it's time for bourbon you know after 9 p.m wines it's it's over man um all right so um i what i what i did next is i actually um oh there's a there's a little type on here there's a there's a bunch of specifications i'm gonna go while uh go over and uh ignore this thing at the top but i've got this for our discussion categorized first into the issues that affect power and we've already talked about it then there's a bunch of specs i think that affect sound quality regardless of power regardless so there's a good question that always comes up for the objectivist and um i'm somewhat of an objectivist but i know that i can't always explain everything that's going on and what i hear because of psychoacoustics and stuff but shouldn't all amps sound the same after a certain point so in other words if you have amp a that's delivering 100 watts of channel at a distortion threshold that's below detectability versus amp b that's delivering the same power and has a distortion that's really low shouldn't they sound identical the the textbook answer should be yes but it's always a little bit more complicated than that what do you think about that anthony it is a bit more complicated and actually there was a great article from a really long time ago in uh i guess i guess it was either stereo review i forget um that actually addressed this question and talked about you know what what is audible or not i'm going to go through that like what are audible things and and here are the the the to an extent they should sound the same however different amps have a different output impedance and different speakers have different impedances and the interaction between the output and pins of of an amplifier and i'll explain that a little later and the speaker load will mean that um a certain speaker may sound different with different amps an easy speaker to drive that has a load that's nice and smooth and pretty high impedance i would challenge most people to hear the difference differences between amplifiers especially if they have high sensitivity if they're pretty high high sensitivity so you're staying away from clips so there's a few things that i noticed they're like man i can really hear the differences so one of them output impedance of the amp and it's not that hard to have a really relatively low output impedance but if you have some speakers like some some of the audiophile speakers out there they don't worry so much about the sensitivity or the impedance curves um those can be a little harder to drive and you will hear the differences sonically between an amplifier with a high output impedance and a low output impedance and i have a i have a chart coming up later that explains why it's actually going to change the net frequency response one thing second pardon me is different amplifiers recover from clip differently and once you push them a little hard you know they're going to clip like the top little things that you don't really hear like they're really short clips on little dynamic things but some of them once they clip they stay clipped for a little while they stick the output devices are in in saturation like heavily saturated and then they st they stay actually on even though the signals come back down so they stay clipped so it's like this sorry history it just takes a while for the dip the base depletion zone to fill back in to get really you know precise about this and so two different amplifiers on a speaker that when you crank it up a little bit that's where you said sensitivity matters if you have a speaker with relatively low sensitivity like 80 or 82 like some of the speakers out there because they really fussed with the frequency response to get it really smooth the sensitivity is low you're going to be clipping the app and when you when you play a little loud you'll notice that you know one sounds clean and the other one just sounds a little harsh and it's just one has a harsher clipping character so i'll give you a quick anecdotal story about that i years ago i measured this pint-sized class d amplifier i think the brand was iq audio or something i'm not even sure if they're in business anymore um so i measured the amplifier it was one of the first load and varying class d amps i've ever measured like i was like oh my god this thing measures the same under any output impedance put out 150 watts rms at eight ohms or continuous and i'm like i want to put this on my status acoustic at speakers which are those 50 000 rbh speakers they dipped down to like three ohms in the base frequencies i wanted to see how it sounded compared to my emotiva xpr one monoblocks which are two kilowatt amps and i did my best to level match and i had you know somebody switching it for me so i wasn't as you know biased by figuring out which amp was i could always tell when i was listening to the um the class d amplifier and the reason why is when i heard transients like i put on miles davis and i was listening to saxophone transient so i was listening to kick drum transients it sounded softer on the class d and then when i went and started doing dynamic tests using burst tests on my audio precision i saw it was a clipping circuit that was not distorting the amp it was just making the signal smaller so it wouldn't clip and i could hear that when i was listening to it on a relatively high sensitivity speaker a 90 db sensitive speaker but because it was dipping into the 3 ohm range it was causing that circuitry to trip more readily than the emotiva amp which could drive a fork right so so those are those conditions and if you had turned it down right by 6db or so you may not hear the difference but it won't really sound like you expect a saxophone to sound which is a pretty loud instrument i play saxophone and dude when i was practicing saxophone in college i had to go hide in the closet so people wouldn't like yell at me so um yeah there are things that are you can call them functional sometimes i call them good behavior that cause differences in audibilities of amplifier even though all the specs seem uh identical and there's a way to build a spec book that says i'm going to be able to see what those differences are that's a great question so someone super chatted us um isaac i don't think i have an answer for you here i'm not too familiar with heigl products i know that they are revered by audiophiles uh anthony have you ever installed any heigl products no i haven't i haven't installed it but i've heard quite a bit of it it sounds absolutely fantastic i think you heard some of it with some dynaudio at the audio show a couple years ago oh yeah yeah yeah that was actually a great product i mean i love the sound of it actually so we gotta we gotta probably get those on the bench test one of these days yeah what's going on there well actually i think mike um is the rep the one that's the james rep oh gotcha thank you for that too so yeah so that that could be in the works for sure okay i'm actually looking uh at hagel and you know hey one of our local dealers is is a dealer for it so i'll go check it out thanks for bringing that up really good job so yeah so those are good questions what is it that makes people like those so there's this other thing that we have to agree i hope we don't agree to disagree is that beyond all the measurements and all the specs and there's this thing that's like perception i don't know i feel better with this one can't explain i i bump into that once in a while so sometimes it's your eyes listening so this this is the look of a hegel amp you know um oh you can't see it beautiful nice big beautiful thing so it's like adding upgraded power chords right yeah if it's beautiful it's going to sound better so you can't listen without okay sure uh but i i years ago i i tested this crazy high-end expensive expensive phono preamp turntable preamp designed by russian nuclear scientists and built on chassis using old missiles that had been recycled this thing was like the chernobyl amp yeah the chernobyl it was like this preamplifier was like built on a marble base all the stuff so i tried to ignore all that stuff and and you know ran a bunch of audio precision tests and like the thing was amazing it was beautifully designed all the tests were great this this thing had this is a phono preamp it could put out 20 volts why because the power supply was 400 volts you don't need that in a photo pre-app just right you connect your turntable to it and the output goes to a preamplifier and do all that aside and then i listen to it it's like dude it just sounded amazing what can i say uh be beyond what all you know it should have been neutral and no better than somebody else's decent photo preamp it just sounded amazing end of story and that does happen and i you know everybody wishes they could completely understand all of those things uh and one day we will understand those you know every year that goes by we all learn a little bit more the the correlation between what the needles say and what our ears perceive so back in the day don and don can relate to this because we kind of came from the same era of circuit city you know with all the different receivers they had in the rooms man i'm telling you the best sounding receivers of circuit city were always ankio and harman kardon by far by far and that that akio 929 that freaking thing was like the thx yeah that or the nine nights to the wall man that thing was heavy you couldn't pick it up and just not listening to it just looking at it you knew that was the best receiver in the world you needed the ed 901 ac3 processor to go with it if you're really good db25 yeah don anecdotally i worked on that product for a long time with did you really it was like there was there was a lot of uh a lot of sweat went into making that thing really really good it was awesome i had the 828 thx because i was poor then the 8901 processor with that ribbon cable that connected to it and i can and i had a pioneer laser display and i was the man you know that was like 1996. 95.96 you're right that that was a good product that was a good product that's great actually and you know is it perception because you couldn't pick it up because it had a nice face plate you know the the the machining the milling of it was really nice oh cool man i didn't know anymore that's awesome who knows yeah um so gene it looks like we're 51 minutes into this or maybe a little bit less how much more do we go do we do we move this to a future session or do we just do this first thing which is that we have we have 300 people we have 300 people in here at midnight crazy so i go i say let's go another let's go another five or ten minutes sounds great thank you guys for listening i'm i'm always amazed that you guys will will stick to this for for as long as you do and then i also get things from people that are international so like there's people for who this it's four in the morning or six in the morning right well you guys really love this i i i it is such a good dragon this guy who's a smart ass i still like him too or a girl can't tell you know um so power related specs so i've grouped these things into you know how much grunt do you get and i'm going to start with something that you'll never actually see somebody i shouldn't say never you will rarely see somebody give you this data and i'm actually on a little bit of a mission to change that and there's a bunch of people within the cd sphere they're like yeah um including amp designers like yeah i wish we could define this this thing way so first thing i want to say that's important is how many volts can this device push to your speaker both long term and short term and over the range of typical impedances this could be a really easy thing for manufacturers to disclose it's related back to watts which i'll bring back in a second but it's a lot easier if imagine a world imagine i have a dream where speakers are actually defined in input voltage and maximum voltage capability right now they're defined in sensitivity which is that when you have 2.8 volts going and you get those so loud if you happen to know that that's one watt but what if the speaker's four roams not eight ohms it gets too wide it can start to go like this is really complicated i'm scratching my head so i have a stream that will switch from from watts to volts so what matters in a power amp is how many volts can it put out some amplifiers have a big very big difference between long term and short term and that has to do with a bunch of different things the power supply the thermal for this to that i'm not going to get into it but um and then what is that output voltage over a range of loads so some speakers may dip down to two ohms some speakers may dip down to eight ohms you know they may average around 12 or 13 ohms and dipped down to eight ohms that would be more like a pro side so that suspect that if you can see it on somebody's spec sheet if you actually see somebody giving you that you should go okay this person's really honest this person's on it and they're honest i should pay attention so that's the first thing it's the next thing that relates to it which is more traditional is the power output capability also sometimes shown in long term and short term although most cases they're just telling you what in the u.s what ul underwriters lab and fdc the fair fair trade commission expect which is if you say it's 100 watts into eight ohms you got to be able to play at an eighth of that forever without overheating yeah and what is it and in some cases when they enforce anything though they never enforce anything no there's no enforcing with ftc at all there used to be and and if anybody actually doubts it you can actually report it back to the ftc and they will run tests or estimates the ftc with the ftc was closing that ruling down and we partitioned them uh on youtube and we got over two like 2500 signatures to keep the ftc ruling in place yeah we flooded the ftc website with people saying don't do it don't don't get away with it yeah so a quick anecdotal story i have another i'm mr anecdote tonight i love it i'm there's the guy who's on the go to go i know i'm taking i'm filling your shoes so i recently reviewed a denon 80 watt per channel integrated amp the a110 the thing weighs like 60 pounds it's it's it's 110th anniversary they're only building it for one year it's built in the shirakawa factory in japan it's a it's a engineering marvel when you look at how this thing is constructed right so when i posted this on the website people are like it's only 80 watts a channel my my 500 den and receiver is 100 watts a channel and i'm like yeah that's true your 100 watt per channel denim receiver can deliver 100 watts you know for maybe a few seconds before the protection circuits kick in i was running 80 watts on this stand and i forgot to turn off the audio precision on the test signal it was running for a good 10 or 15 minutes and i touched the top of the of the cover and it was warm that it wasn't burning up if that was an avr that would have been burning up being really hot and this thing could double down with having load impedance i got 300 and something watts out of it in two ohms you can't get that with a 500 receiver so right there when you're talking about long term if you think about it the review industry does everything with sweep tones usually at one kilohertz and that's just an instantaneous that's like a 0 to 60 time on a perfect track with no wind resistance or anything like that and for for years when class d amplifiers first came out the all the magazines were only testing them at one kilohertz and what happened when you took an ice amplifier and drove a forum load if you went above three kilohertz the amp would cut into a third of power because of the post filter feedback couldn't handle the lower the higher current demands of uh low impedance loads and it was always missed by the magazines until we started doing full bandwidth measurements on it and this is why we do need we need not only do we need long term and short term but we need full bandwidth not one kilohertz crap because you really need to know how that amplifier behaves at the low frequencies and more importantly the high frequencies are the ones that are more challenging uh usually than the low frequencies because you have slew rated distortions and other things and if you're doing a class d after the switching supply if the switching frequency is not high enough you start seeing unusual behavior around 20 kilohertz yeah some funny intermodulation so um so this this number this power output capability is a traditional thing and it and it is actually i'll just say it's marred into legality so you don't really know what it means somebody's 80 watts could actually have more output voltage and somebody's 120 watts because it it's all about some thermal some guarantee that thermally the thing will work and so we can't change it let's let's keep power output but let's also tell people what is the output voltage capability of this thing into these loads long term and short term regardless of thermal like what can this thing put out into a 4 ohm load across the frequency range and i'm going to get to that like the power bandwidth of the thing and that would be really interesting and you can relate that back to what your speaker needs in terms of volts and related in terms of current to what's the load so there are a few people who talk about voltage swing capabilities there's a few amps out there in the commercial and pro side everybody else is still living in this power business and it's confusing well let me ask you this anthony let me play the devil's advocate would it be easier to do what they do in the computer industry where they when you buy a computer you buy it with a power supply and it tells you how many watts the power supply is that way you know you could drive your video cards and all your other cards in that computer why not have a power supply rating say this is the max capability of that power supply so you really know what that amplifier could do when it's driving one channel five channels seven channels whatever if you know the max power supply capability even over a specified amount of time whether it's a second or a minute would that not be the easier path that's an interesting thing it would get i think if everybody's on the same footing on that and the loads are all resistive uh that may be good but but speakers are not resistors they have power factors there's different um efficiencies of different amplifiers so given the same thing um so anecdotally i'm going to go back to powersoft they have a new series of amps in which they give you the model number the they have a 300 series and a 600 series and they're basically saying here's a brick that you can buy as a two channel or a four channel device it can put out 300 watts if you just drive one one output it'll get 300 watts out of one output if you drive all you know two outputs you get 150 watts if you drive all four at the same time you get 75. it basically is thinking the power brick the actual power supply that's feeding electrons out um can deliver just like you said on a computer it can do up to 300 watts however you're going to use it so that's it i like that i like that that's that's cool um and um that would be more useful but then you would if you don't also know what's the capability of a single output because that has to do with the the actual devices uh you need both you actually need to understand what a single output can do and what all of them driven can you you kind of do know that because here's what's happening with the receiver industry they used to give you two channels driven full bandwidth power now they're since atmos came out now they're giving you one channel driven a 10 distortion at six ohms so they can inflate it it's almost a two and a half time increase over its eight ohm full bandwidth low distortion rate so you do kind of know the max and i and i and i could simulate how they're doing these tests now it's just it's an instantaneous test at one kilohertz ten percent at six ohms and that's the max that that that that receiver could deliver for one channel driven right and you know we kind of already have that what's that yeah yeah you don't want to listen at that point so the other thing that some manufacturers give you and that question i almost feel like it was a plant about the um the parasol amp is some manufacturers tell you the maximum output current and it's like do you need that well it's kind of you know it may be nice to know that hey this thing is designed like with tons and tons of current headroom if it needed it could deliver 60 amps you're never going to use it but if you actually just do a little bit of math or you just want the number you know this is this is sort of same as above really uh except that i want to keep saying that the power output capability if you follow the letter of the law is under certain conditions and doesn't really tell you by law exactly what this thing can do really in terms of being able to drive your speaker to the peak levels you need so you can enjoy a saxophone a drum anything that's out you know triple forte on the piano which is you know big loud peaks you don't really know from this because of the way it's supposed to be measured um so um what's interesting about my slide over here is nobody's telling you or say very few people are giving you this maximum output voltage everybody's giving you this under conditions that are widely variable and some people are giving you current so what do you do with all that you ask you know um you you if you're looking at an amp and you're like you know i'm really interested in this and there's something i like about it you know the dealer that sells it i really like whatever the price pick up the phone and asked to talk to engineering at the manufacturer you'd be surprised you know they'll answer they'll put you through and you'll talk to somebody that would love to geek out about it for a while maybe not in shirakawa that may be difficult to get a hold of somebody over there but um you may find somebody that can give you those numbers yeah i mean some the one that there's a bunch of problems with the consumers buy on specs and they don't really understand specs then you combine that with manufacturers that have somewhat misleading specs or adjusted specs where people just do an overview of it then you move into the forums and all the people who think they're in the know and then there's all this misinformation that's out there um that's what drew me to audioholics years ago was was the the comprehensive measurements that they did on everything versus even some of the other review companies out there um and it's and it's sad because people just don't know what to buy you know unless they can find somebody trusted like an integrator or a retail store that has listened to these products with multitude of speakers and a multitude of environments so this is great information and i think both of you for bringing this to the public you're welcome so i would say listen to gene gene measures these things you know the same way that any decent engineer would measure them um he's an engineer don't forget um and uh so you know so look at the reviews there um look forward in the next i'd say the next six months to this thing that we're doing within cedia where you're going to actually start to see these cydia uh sanctions spec disclosures that go into some of these pieces of info that don't uh that are not marred by some legacies of well this is how it's always been done so we're going to keep doing this it's funny almost every week on these conferences i'm i'm cheering one of the committees there's like you can't do that nobody's done that before it's like you know they told the guy that got into those three boats that tried to get over to india from from originally from from italy you can't get there from here you're gonna drown you're gonna you know you're gonna end up at the end of the world and he discovered what he thought was india was actually america so so don't ever tell people you can't do that because you you know you could get there and wait a minute i thought bugs bunny discovered america he did but they just didn't want to change the history books for him you don't have to spend a million dollars on an amplifier either to get really great sound i know a lot of people just real quick before we we get out of here i'm not a huge fan of using commercial amps and residential products unless it's maybe an uber high-end crown i've just never got really good sound from him and i know people want to argue what's your thoughts on that gene and anthony well i think the i'll i'll answer then anthony ken the the problem i see is when people go out on the internet and they buy the two or three hundred dollar uh commercial amps that claim they're a thousand watts and they have a bunch of fans and yeah there's no there's no real heat sink in anything so they have fans running all the time and what you could do with mod you could change the fans i'm like really at that point once you get a real amplifier that's made for consumer audio not for sound reinforcement um so there's good amps and bad apps um and i'll use residential amps and commercial amps like like i said these days i'm using a lot of this power soft stuff that sounds absolutely amazing it was not designed for residential even though they're they're doing a big push to get into this these days it is a high-end product um and it's very very well designed by people who have really good ears musicians you know in italy they're italian so you know they know cappuccino and chocolate right um and uh so they're they're getting so i would not generalize on that the funny thing is that there's some high-end amps in the harman brands that are designed by crown you know they come right out of the commercial space they put a new case around it maybe they change some of the knobs and inputs so i wouldn't generalize that yes there are a lot on the in the commercial space where where cost is very very tight you know we you you don't have the luxury of doing things at the right price there's a bunch of them out there that just don't sound that good because they have distortion problems they have you know whatever and you and you if you start to look at the specs you may notice that well and then the other thing too and then this is we're wrapping this up but there's a quick way to determine you know how quiet an amp is just by looking at their spec most of the time amplifier companies give you signal to noise ratio at max power they never give it to you at one watt so you have to go and you i could show you how in another video how you could take that max power rating and translate it down to one watt and then determine if that's an a weighted measurement or if it's bandwidth limited measurement because that could change the results as well generally speaking i like to see at least 80 db signal to noise ratio at one watt um preferably unweighted but if it's a class d amp maybe a weighted 90 db is really good like the really good amplifiers at one watt will give you 90 db snr so that's some of these uh distribution amps or these uh commercial amps the cheaper ones when i calculate it down to one watt they're like in the 70s or 80s and that's not including fan noise which can add a bad experience if you're close to this amplifier it costs money to make a low noise circuit so um you know when you when you're when you're saying 80 db down uh from one watt and then you're looking at doing high res audio you realize you need 144 db of dynamic range but now your amplifier is only you know 80 down with maybe 20 db a headroom you're you're miss you're missing on that so one of the things we're going to do in the spec is actually specify noise in millivolts so that there's just no no confusion and then also specify this concept of dynamic range which is sort of the equivalent in video to to just contrast ratio you know what's the difference between the max and men um and then that will help just by by eyeballing those numbers to see what it's right and you don't always have to have a really low noise app if you're doing something in an environment that's noisy what you know why spend money on something that's super quiet when the ambient noise is high which is what happens a lot in commercial spaces right especially lower end commercial amps and i know crown makes some fantastic hyena amps along with lua and the many other companies out there so so we got a super chat here saying i need to do more reviews of uh products yeah that's that's the problem is i'm only one person and i'm trying to get matthew online to do amplifier measurements as well um i do want to review some of the higher end crown amps one of these days but right now every all my efforts are going to the audiohawk smart home with don's help and your help anthony because i think we're doing something that nobody's ever done before and we're documenting the entire process from start to finish on youtube and it's getting noticed i'm getting calls all the time from manufacturers wanting to be part of this so if you don't mention you should have like a trip somebody wants to come down because i'm telling you this this house is just sick for lack of a better journey but anthony you could come for free well thank you thank you i'll bring chocolate yes i'll bring bourbon all right so what are we doing next time are we gonna the next time we're gonna do this next thursday we're gonna cover or actually i'm gonna be and i'm gonna be on vacation i might bring you something on vacation gene is actually gonna take a week off i haven't had anything i'm telling anybody what are you talking about yeah i wish um i i vote i've got a bunch more things to talk about so we quickly went over the things that relate to power notice i didn't spend a lot of time on that because it's pretty straightforward then i've got a bunch more slides if you guys are into us in two weeks we'll just pick up from here and keep going so we'll talk about the things that can potentially matter with sound quality the things like sound quality exactly a power you could say power matters with sound quality or not well if you're if you want dynamics and you want to not click on triple fortes you need the power but the next set of slides is about things that you i guess i would just sort of put as like wow it sounds really good regardless of like whether you're cranking up or not so i got a whole bunch of concepts there and and that's probably the most controversial part of of this conversation is what does good sound mean how do you measure it what do the specs tell you and what don't they tell you and i'm i'm more than aware that we don't know everything about what makes things sound really good we're getting there we're getting so so dom we got a question for you when will the smart home be done well we're going to have the theater done by the 14th well yeah we're going to have it well by the end of june by the way yeah our rbhs can come in and do their calibration um we just got a few we gotta get your electrician to put the lighting in which we need to get that done and um i'm we're pretty much close to wrapping it up we've got probably well no we got the outdoor landscape 65 with the theater will be about 85 percent done when are we going to put some sniper rifles outside so in case i get people i don't want to come into my front door i don't know nothing about guns you don't know nothing about guns yeah crazy uh and you got to put your acoustical treatments up too right next when he gets back from vacation so so anthony i want to leave you with one question i'm just kind of curious because there's always a stigma with pete with audio files not like in receivers and i love receivers if they're good receivers what are the percentages of home theater installations that you do that use a receiver as opposed to separate so i'm just kind of curious um that's a that's a good question um there are some really good sounding receivers out there in which the you know the amplifiers are just really well designed you were talking about this onkyo product that thing sounded amazing you know on an ab comparison the amp sections of those against some some high-end amps sounded every bit as good and even kenwood you know not not only i used to love kenwood yeah for the mic were great their thx stuff was awesome right when you think about it a really good receiver has perfect gain matching between the preamp and the power ramp so you can get really low noise as a result of that and you don't have output buffer circuits that have to go to cables and go back into something so we actually you're reducing the distortions if you want to think of it that way by keeping it all together now all that being said a lot of the projects i'm working on are kind of on the upper end so receivers are not in there it's separates um but that's not because i say it's not gonna sound good with a receiver um so let me give you a few cool examples of receivers that work really well so yamaha makes receivers that have built-in dsp for room correction i love those things they work well they sound good they got plenty of power and you can go in there and tweak the eq and all of these of of the difference look at that look at how yeah i'm excited about these new yamahas i really am yeah that's that's cool um storm audio on the high end makes an integrated surround processor amplifier which is a receiver it just doesn't have a tuner built in that is amazing it's absolutely amazing it's got the amplifier sections are basically straight out of their separates and the decoders set out their separate so it just happens right yeah yeah so i i would i would say don't generalize it receivers are not good sound that's just totally unfair uh they can work well if they're designed correctly it doesn't mean they're designed correctly but they can't there's nothing because they're all in one box there's nothing that says that it can't work well as as long as the power supply is built correctly and all the circuits are built correctly there's people go well there's going to be a little bit of crosstalk between channels like dude you do not hear a crosstalk below 20 db or yeah i've i i usually get across the flagship from dannon like the avr 5805 back in the day that thing had a better amp section than most dedicated channels you're still hurting about selling that thing aren't you 100 monster it was a host dude that new marantz that you have though that you fly at the 8015 yeah have you ever installed an 80 15 in the job because it's a really good sounding receiver it's a badass receiver it really is a good good i mean there's tons we really are in a renaissance there's a lot of great gear out there right yep yep all right guys well we're going to wrap this up like i said we're going to continue on in two weeks to talk about what makes or breaks an amplifier in terms of sound quality what specs you can kind of look for as a guide hopefully that can help you guys make better purchasing decisions we'll have of course more anecdotal stories from myself don and anthony appreciate you guys all coming here so late at night don't forget about our patreon channel at patreon.com audioholics you get to answer ask us direct questions suggest video topics i'll put this powerpoint in there as well if you guys want to look at it and follow along with this live stream that we just did and everybody stay up thank you to uncle anthony because it's a really big big deal that we got him on here you guys uh you should know yeah i missed you man i missed having you yep so we got one last super chat from muhammad what are the best speaker systems for imax enhanced uh well the only imax enhanced speakers that are certified right now tech and pulse and that's kind of an ambiguous spec i don't really understand that spec and i want to find out more about that but i know that those are the only two brands of speakers right now that have the imax enhanced you need to have them on the imax people to tell it to break it down because i i still don't understand what it is i will tell you the new polk reserve series look really nice so yeah good speakers to check out and they're very affordable as well all right guys we are wrapped up and until next time my friends keep listening

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 49,858

Keywords: amplifiers, power, sound, high fidelity, audiophile, home theater, surround sound, amplifier clipping, distortion, loudness, hifi, speakers

Id: vw1SG9tGun0

Length: 75min 37sec (4537 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021