CLASS A AMPLIFIERS

No. The sonic benefit is that the entire signal is swung by a transistor (or several in parallel) instead of individual halves of the signal being split up by two different transistors. Since there is no "handing off" of the signal to another transistor, there is potentially less distortion. But then feedback comes into play but that is another story...

Some will say that Class A always sounds better than Class A/B but in fact, it largely depends on the circuit design.

Generally, they are not more powerful. Class A designs are extemely inefficient because it requires that a lot of heat be dissipated to maintain stability, robbing power to drive speakers. For technical as well as practical reasons, this limits their power output stages to around 100 watts and their ideal design power rating is usually 80 wpc or less.

Charlot

This web site goes into a bit more detail concerning the differenct classes of amplifier circuit designs http://www.knowledgeisfun.com/E/El/Electronic-amplifier.php

In general class A is much less effecient than either class B or A/B(most common design) but procduces less distortion (e.g.cross over distortion in class AB) than either class B or A/B. With the inefficency comes heat,caused by bias current, which must be dealt with by utilizing large heat sinks.This generally makes pure clas A unsuitable for high powered amplifiers. An example that comes to mind is Nelson Pass his X seriers is class A/B and ranges in power from 150 (X150) watts to 1000 (X1000)watts per channel. The XA amps are pure class A and range in power from 150 (XA150) watts to 200 (XA200) watts per channel.

Chuck

Chuck