opaqueice;172033 Wrote: > My question was just why amplitude and not power - I would guess that > human perception of distortion scales more closely with the power than > with the amplitude, but perhaps that's wrong. > > I don't understand what you're saying in your post. That tube amp has > 5 times more distortion amplitude (-45dB), or 25 times more distortion > power, at 1/10 of a watt. Extrapolating the A500 distortion (which is > quite linear on the log-log plot from a few watts down) to lower power, > to get to -45dB you'd have to go down another three orders of magnitude. > So at .0001 W the two distortions would be comparable, assuming the > tube amp curve stays flat. I doubt even the most sensitive speakers > are going to make much noise at that level. > > Therefore into any speakers the A500 has significantly lower > distortion, so I don't see why you think it would sound bad. > > EDIT - looking at three different tube power amps, the distortion at > .1W varies from around .2% to around .6%, so I don't think that design > is particularly atypical.
I see how you are thinking. However, you can't extrapolate anything down in level when it comes to crossover distortion. It's a discontinuity in the transfer curve which is of equal size regardless of the signal level. It doesn't scale with the signal. Put a low enough signal in there and it will be 100% distortion. (Well, depending on exactly how the discontinuity looks.) I hope that made it clearer? -- P Floding ------------------------------------------------------------------------ P Floding's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2932 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31843 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
