The other day I was wondering just how much power I really need for my rig. Can't be much as I run Altec A5s in a small room - but how much? Would a 10 Watt SE amp be enough?

So I set out to figure out how much power I need.

A few weeks back while doing some crossover work and measuring voltages I was surprised to find that my horns are running about 5mW of power - average. Uhhh, that's not much. OK, but what about the woofers? Here is how I proceeded:

1. I found a few bass heavy tracks and played them as loud as I would ever care to.
2. The average volume knob setting for these was noted.
3. The tracks were opened in GoldWave and low pass filtered at 440Hz, same as the woofer section.
4. The low passed tracks were analyzed in GoldWave for their RMS value. Average was -15.5dBFS RMS
5. Using the function generator in GoldWave I made a 40-880Hz, 30 second sweep at -15.5dBFS.
6. This sweep was played back several times at the same volume setting as before.
7. Voltage

...

Can High Fidelity include audible distortion?

From the ultimate heights of fidelity we should hear a perfect reproduction of the recorded signal all the way from source to speakers – right? Perhaps that depends on your idea of fidelity. Where does your fidelity lie? What are you being faithful to? To the recorded waveform, or something else? Could your idea of fidelity be that you want the final result to be faithful to the direct sound of the music? Is your goal a faithful reproduction of the music, or of the recorded signal? The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but can often be at odds.

Low distortion is the second of the two founding pillars of HiFi - frequency response being the first. Any distortion alters the signal, therefore it must be wrong. Or so says conventional thinking. To be highly faithful to the signal, we must alter it as little as possible, granted the possible exception of overall level or volume. But what if our goal...

This morning I was waking up the music server to have a listen. I run a Windoze XP box with JRiver Media Center.

JRiver gave me a pop-up error message that there had been an incomplete shutdown, did I want to fix any problems? There had been a power outage for a couple of hours last night that shut down the server. So if course I clicked "OK".

Bam! Screen goes dark. WTF? I look at the crossover and the tube amps - all dark. All dead. Now what I have done?

Well, it wasn't my mouse click that killed everything, the power was out again. Phew. But talk about scary timing. Click OK and everything dies right on the click.

Fortunately for us we have a 12KW generator that kicks in and can run the whole house.

All back to normal now.

OK, just because you own the latest Whizbang-3000 15 megapixel camera, does NOT mean you know how to use it. Sure, you may take pretty pictures, but posting them here, or elsewhere on the web, requires some thought and effort.

See my comments below for more info. Click on "comments" down here.