High Current vs high power

^^ Yes, audiophiles have seen those pesky spec sheets for amplifiers for decades, but so little on them tells us what is going to sound right that you still have to do the audition. More fodder for the objectivist/subjectivist debate...

Have a Rowland 8T has both over 250 CH plus High Currant i have both.

Zd ... more than you know, I agree with what you said about live auditions. A while back, I posted a comment about road testing two sets of speakers at a dealer friend's shop. Coincidentally, he had just taken in trade an ARC VS-115 tube amp, which until a week ago was the amp I used. That's about as good as it gets for "A/B'ing" speakers. I was quite surprised that a speaker similar to my current fronts ("Brand P") cleaned the floor up with Brand X. Was it the gear, the room, the cables, the amp??? Dunno. But in "theory" Brand X should have cleaned up the floor with Brand P. Go figure.

But here's the dilemma. How often can one fairly audition speakers, amps and other gear given the paucity of high end B&M stores? Forget being able to control all the variables, like using the same model amp when comparing speakers. At least in my neck of the woods, forget taking gear home. Doesn't happen.

OTOH, I find the subject of speaker/amp electrical compatibility interesting. Grasping the variables, many of which are EE design trade-offs, is challenging. But that's me.

Cheers

Bruce

EMB you are a lucky man !!!!

The Rowland 8Ti is a good example of what I was talking about.

Into 4 ohms it is rated 400 watts, but the current figure states(from the website):

50 amps continuous, 100 amps peak

Its pretty obvious this has nothing to do with power! 50 amps continuous into a 1 ohm load would be 2500 watts, yet we can see from the specs that the amp is unable to double power between 8 down to 4 ohms. Even it if could continue to double power to 1 ohm, the output power would "only" be 1600 watts.

What is being stated here would seems to be that the power transformer can provide 50 amps on a continuous basis. I suspect though that if that were to actually happen it would blow its mains fuse in less than a second.

So what we can conclude without speculation or debate is that this 'current' figure is not a real-world spec so much as it is a measure of the capacity of the power supply. I have seen, FWIW, tube amps with this much and more 'current'.