Why has amplifier power become a big issue
I blame it on the Bose 901. Prior to the introduction of that power-hungry loudspeaker, a 50 or 60 watt (per channel) amplifier was considered all a speaker, even the inefficient acoustic suspension designs of the day such as the Acoustic Research 3a, needed. Plus, that’s about as powerful an amp as was available at the time, one exception being the McIntosh MC2100 (105w/ch), which I owned. That all changed with the appearance of the Phase Linear 700 (350w/ch). The power race was on, along with as-low-as-possible-no-matter-the-sonic-penalty low test-bench distortion figures. J. Gordon Holt with his Stereophile Magazine alone, until Harry Pearson published the first issue of The Absolute Sound in 1973, fought against the insanity that followed. Luckily, at about the same time, the emergence of high end amplifiers, designed for sound quality into speakers rather than ultra-low distortion specs into test-bench simulated speaker loads, were beginning to appear in the new audiophile dealer network springing up around the country, selling the pioneering Audio Research Corporation products (with their tube amps, tubes having been abandoned by the hi-fi industry years before) and other perfectionist sound quality designs. It’s important to remember that a doubling of output power, all else being equal, increases SPL by only 3dB. A 300w amp, identical in every way to a 150w one save power output, provides only a 3dB increase in sound. Big deal. |
When you say power, there’s two types, current and wattage. You can have 300w in a small package with no current. But to get that 300w with great current as well, things start to grow, so does your electric bill. It’s because many hiend speakers themselves have become harder and harder to drive, many of Wilson ect droping down to sometimes 1 or even less ohms, unheard of back in the day. They need both wattage and current. And it became progressivly worse since those Avent days, not a bad thing as todays harder to drive speakers sound very good compare to the old sludge boxes of yester year. Cheers George |
