"High Current"

Sean...To put it briefly...we don't operate our amps at clipping. What we care about is distortion-free power, and that's what is usually quoted.

BEAR this in mind :-)

El: I think that you missed the point. The ability to deliver the amount of "clean" power as needed in a timely fashion on a dynamic basis at any given frequency or impedance is what i'm talking about. The closer that one comes to achieving that goal, the more refined, musical and natural their system will perform. The lack of smearing, strain and ringing combined with the improvements in liquidity and harmonic structure that one experiences is an eye & ear opening experience. The music is no longer coming from a stereo system, sounding canned, compressed and "box-like", but actually spreads out and presents a very dynamic yet subtle panoramic view into the recording.

Much of this comes from the improved response times and control that a non-current limited wide bandwidth high dynamic headroom system provides. If you actually measured the peak power required to reproduce specific types of dynamic transients, you might be pretty shocked. When you factor in that the impedance of the speaker varies over the frequency range and that more / less power & ability to control and respond to the signal and load may be required simultaneously, one begins to understand that you can never have "too much", so long as it can respond on a very timely and dynamic basis.

Obviously, one can avoid some of these pitfalls by picking speakers that present a gentle impedance curve with lower levels of reactance, but such designs typically tend to sound somewhat "stifled" to me. That's because the manufacturer has typically added quite a few parts to the crossover to tame specific resonances and problems. This ends up sucking the life and harmonic structure out of the music and reducing the quality of the amplifier / driver interphase.

I guess that it boils down to the fact that we are damned if we do, damned if we don't. There are obviously compromises to be made in all but the very most expensive, well-designed systems out there. I always strive to try and reduce the potential for technically related problems, but when it comes down to it, the bottom line is that it has to sound good. Luckily, resolving most of the technical issues ends up sounding markedly better, so the two goals seem to work hand in hand. Sean
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Sean...How could I have missed your point? All those beautiful audiophile words..Clean power, refined musical and natural, lack of smearing strain and ringing, harmonic structure, yada yada,yada. I just don't agree with all your conclusions.

Until one has heard / experienced a system that is capable of such things, their standard of reference will be lower than someone that has had such an experience. Based on common sense, my previous education and a lack of exposure / experience, i used to think that a power cord couldn't produce either measurable or audible differences in audio components. As such, i clung to that belief quite adamantly. After opening myself up to such ideas and conducting some simple tests, i experiencing quite the opposite first hand. This not only changed my point of view, but helped me come to understand how / why this was possible.

What i'm getting at is that man doesn't know nearly as much as we think we do. Life is a learning experience and audio is no different. One can learn / unlearn as much as they want to, based on how much effort they are willing to put forth in doing so. There are things that i now know to be true that i would have worked hard to refute just a few years ago. Those things that i believed to be accurate up until a few years ago were based on many years of first hand experience and education. The bottom line is that i was lacking both education and experience in certain areas and until i opened myself to learn more in those areas, i was stifling my own personal growth and that of my audio systems.

If this sounds like i'm on a pulpit preaching, it's not meant to. It's simply meant to explain why some folks may have different points of view than others do, even if they may have similar qualifications and / or backgrounds. The same can be said for audio components. They might measure similarly in certain areas, but be quite different in others. Thinking that they all sound the same would be equivalent to thinking that all people are the same. This is obviously not true and both cases are quantifiable. Sean
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With all due respect to all, what Sean is saying is hardly revolutionary -- and thereby, hardly controversial. All he's describing is an amp where the manufacturer is (truthfully) saying: "this amp is stable down to 2ohms and I guarantee that at that (resistive) load this amp will produce 1200W of energy; similarly, it will produce 600W if the load is 4ohm and 300W if the load is 8ohm".
What said manufacturer did NOT openly claim is that these are peak power/ energy ratings before clipping.
All SEAN is saying is that one shouldn't construe these specs as such. Some manufacturers may be refering to peak W at clipping while others NOT: I.e., what the manufacturer COULD be saying is "this amp will put out a MAX of 1200W at 2ohms, well over 600W at 4ohms, and substantially over 300W at 8ohms".

In the old times some manufacturers were even proud of quoting stability at 1ohm to show how well their product had been implemented.