2. amps-preamps
  3. 140029-80294

Does anyone care to ask an amplifier designer a technical question? My door is open.

I closed the cable and fuse thread because the trolls were making a mess of things. I hope they dont find me here.

I design Tube and Solid State power amps and preamps for Music Reference. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, have trained my ears keenly to hear frequency response differences, distortion and pretty good at guessing SPL. Ive spent 40 years doing that as a tech, store owner, and designer.
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Perhaps someone would like to ask a question about how one designs a successfull amplifier? What determines damping factor and what damping factor does besides damping the woofer. There is an entirely different, I feel better way to look at damping and call it Regulation , which is 1/damping.

I like to tell true stories of my experience with others in this industry.

I have started a school which you can visit at http://berkeleyhifischool.com/ There you can see some of my presentations.

On YouTube go to the Music Reference channel to see how to design and build your own tube linestage. The series has over 200,000 views. You have to hit the video tab to see all.

I am not here to advertise for MR. Soon I will be making and posting more videos on YouTube. I don’t make any money off the videos, I just want to share knowledge and I hope others will share knowledge. Asking a good question is actually a display of your knowledge because you know enough to formulate a decent question.

Starting in January I plan to make these videos and post them on the HiFi school site and hosted on a new YouTube channel belonging to the school.


128x128ramtubes
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
7,068 posts
 
Just because they make a difference it does not follow that a power cord does. In power cables there is not much to measure and a lot of other wire to consider.
I would not base an assessment of a power cord on the effects of interconnects or speaker cables. Ohm's Law works much better :)
You can measure the voltage drop of the power cord with a simple DVM.
As to its effects, its easier to see how it affects the equipment to which its connected. Some gear is more sensitive to AC input voltage than others, but in general, measure power output, output impedance and distortion. These will vary according to power cords, but not according to the cost of those cables  :)
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
4,908 posts
 
Nelson Pass is now offering a kit version of his nice First Watt B4 active electronic x/o at an irresistible price. It provides 1st/2nd/3rd/4th-order high-pass and low-pass filers (6-12-18-24 dB/octave) in 25Hz increments from 25Hz to 3200Hz, via discrete circuitry (no opamps, no ic's, purely analog). A speaker unusably easy to bi-amp with a x/o such as the B4 is the .6 and earlier Maggies. For instance, one can simply use the B4 in place of the outboard x/o included with the 3.6; the B4 filters the bass out of the signal sent to the amp used on the woofer drivers from the amp driving the midrange drivers and tweeters, and visa versa. The improvement is huge! This is possible with the 3.6 because the speaker's x/o is a parallel design; in the 3.7, Magnepan unfortunately switched to a series x/o, so bi-amping is not possible with performing internal surgery on the speaker.
michaellent's avatar
michaellent
23 posts
 
Why can’t people stay focused? Ramtubes started this discussion about amplifiers and it looks like it fell into the cable whole again! 
Start your own thread about cables of any different kind and stay out of the ones that have nothing to do with it!
michaellent's avatar
michaellent
23 posts
 
Hole not whole. I want to learn about amplifiers
clio09
2,978 posts
 
@bdp24 - where can I find that B4 crossover kit you referenced. Haven’t been able to locate it on the Internet.
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