Well, the concert I just went to had no issues at all with amplification. Nice little 800 seat venue. A concert of English Bells. No PA. Clean, soft, and the overtones surrounded you.
These folks actually:
Colonial English Handbell Ringers - YouTube
These folks actually:
Colonial English Handbell Ringers - YouTube
I think Pavel referred to the PERCEIVED notion of those chips. Indeed, I have met many people who sincerely believed that those chips were high end and in fact did away with any need for true high end devices. Stupid, I know, but people will think what suits them, not what really is.
And National Semiconductor did have a masterful presentation of them, lots of guided logic, so it's understandable why so many flies stuck to the honey.
I did say I have heard a few implementations which sounded even very good, but there's no inkling of any true high end in them. Also, in part, I agree with Pavel regarding current capabilities, if facing a difficult load they will not cut it, period. When true grit, or muscle, is needed, nothing beats discrete power devices.
But I cannot simply disregard Frank's point, most people do own small(ish) 2 way speakers, which they listen to at low power levels and which are not (too) nasty loads, and under such circumstances, those chip amps can be a very cost effective solution even when properly implemented.
@ Pavel,
@ dvv,
Thanks good
that there some good and stable minds over here and You are still firmly not allowing Yours minds to be BRAIN WASHED
and that many of You still know those old good feelings when walking socks-less with with feet's touching the real mother nature ground and feel free .. ..
Knowing all those real tastes and and have the respect to the old good believing we've got from our parents and grand parents
& conscious in what is right, good and what is bad.
From those basics it is much, much easier to one's have it's own (unwashed soul) feelings as an individual of what an nice soul touching music is . . . .
and just not allowing to anyone to make You a patronized (brainwashed) sheep
. . . . I highly admire Yours work, please keep Yours good work in the future and I wish to all good fellas here in
Diy Audio
a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
Andreas
"Andreas" suggests Greek origins - right? Kalimera, Andreas.
Anyway, thank you for your comments. As you may or may not know, Pavel has been around a long time and has an impeccable track record, even though I have actually heard only one of his projects a friend made (a preamp), but that was much more than just very good.
And I am, as you say, 100% "old school". Just 60, and still crazy after all these years, to paraphrase Paul Simon's song.
Anyway, thank you for your comments. As you may or may not know, Pavel has been around a long time and has an impeccable track record, even though I have actually heard only one of his projects a friend made (a preamp), but that was much more than just very good.
And I am, as you say, 100% "old school". Just 60, and still crazy after all these years, to paraphrase Paul Simon's song.
This is very true when playing well recorded dynamic music , the limited quality music Frank is talking about with it's sustained db's is noisy enuff that it will require shouting at high levels ..
Good stuff , i live on a lot of big choir and musical type stuff as well ....
No not so , small speakers actually require really big amplifiers to really open up and sound lifelike , a lot more than most would think , a bigger 3way speaker will do a lot better with the lower power D ..
Pavel is correct its mid-fi at best , if your are happy with that then its alright ...
Andrew, it's quite logical that they should be current deficient, that has been their weakness ever ince the occurence of Sanyo anufactured power amp chips in the late 70ies. So long as your load impedance didn't dip below 7 Ohms, they could work.
Large currents require large dies, and large dies are expensive enough to make power amp chips unsellable if capable of very high currents.
That's why National Semiconductor used to offer their LM381-xx power amp chips, everything but the driver and output device(s). To me, this was a far better idea, as one could dimension one's output stage according to one's needs, so even Wayne could build a good amp on basis of it. It's gone now, but it has been replaced by two, one for BJT, the other for MOS output stages brand new amps (LME 498011 and 49839).
You may remember that Kenwood/Trio and later on Technics also used tis technology. Hwever, Kenwood/Trio's take was to integrate drivers and output devices into homogenous chips, to keep the thermally balanced, while Technics made its bid by using MOS output technology.
All of them ran into problems when facing difficult loads. I suspect they actually could build such chips for lower loads, but that the price is forbidding, as it would defeat the "cheap'n'cheerful" ideal.
As far I could gather from the data sheets (haven't tried it out live), the current LME 49811 suffesr from one shortcoming only, and that is its rather pedestrian slew rate of barely 12 or 16 V/uS, which is simply too low for the possible power applications of up to 200Wrms into 8 Ohms. To be fully viable, it would have to be about four times that.
The MOS version does a bit better at 39 V/uS typical.
So, as I see it, you were blamed for telling the truth by some devotees quite divrced from any reason.
This seems to come across as small speakers needing bigger amps than large speakers.
Which would be quite ridiculous as a generalization. No doubt some less efficient speakers do need more than average power to come alive, but if memory serves, all the speakers I have ever heard or heard of which were considered as amp killers, to the one, were large to very large speakers, not one was a small job.
Small speakers have that problem of needing more power, but usually having a lower upper power limit than largers speakers, a nice way of saying they often have a rather narrow power window, much like diesel engines have a narrow power bandwidth compared to a petrol engine.
Which also clearly means that their dynamic range is sorely lacking in most cases. But, they are the current fad, they are "in" these days, at least in homes of those made from 1980 onwards.
Wayne, in my experience, big sound comes ONLY from big speakers.
D,
I said to sound life like , i did not say small sounds bigger than big and there are different levels of small too, case in point, if you have a small 2way 6.5 inch woofer with 1 inch dome , this speaker on really good amplification will not sound smaller than say another with the same mid/tweeter sizing and additional two 12 inch woofers . They will lack the dynamics in the bass and refinement at high levels due to the excursion, but done right , with enuff enclosure volume to reduce dynamic compression and a big enuff amplifier they will come close on recordings not bass dominant.
This is the very reason why if you want to get more life like in scale you need a linesource system , no single point source speaker will be able to match it , regardless of how big they make the monkey coffin , it's dynamic limitations is still that 1 inch single tweeter ....
I said to sound life like , i did not say small sounds bigger than big and there are different levels of small too, case in point, if you have a small 2way 6.5 inch woofer with 1 inch dome , this speaker on really good amplification will not sound smaller than say another with the same mid/tweeter sizing and additional two 12 inch woofers . They will lack the dynamics in the bass and refinement at high levels due to the excursion, but done right , with enuff enclosure volume to reduce dynamic compression and a big enuff amplifier they will come close on recordings not bass dominant.
This is the very reason why if you want to get more life like in scale you need a linesource system , no single point source speaker will be able to match it , regardless of how big they make the monkey coffin , it's dynamic limitations is still that 1 inch single tweeter ....
With all respect, Wayne, but there's no comparison between a 6.5 inch mid/bass operating in a small box working up to 2.5 or 3 kHz and a say 10" bass operating in a large box up to say 800 Hz.
That's like saying that both a BMX bike and a Harley Davidson Electra Glide are both transportation vehicles. In absolute terms, they are, both have two wheels each, but there, all similarity ends.
The first deep organ, or piano, or tympani note that comes along will dispel all dreams of the small box owner as to fidelity. Not to even dare mention a well recorded CD of Japanese taiko drummers. The best he can hope for is hearing the second harmonic, and that's like listening to music second hand.
Small speakers, especially those with astronomical prices, are just another sick fad of today, except where space is truly at a premium.
... or you weren't clear enough?
Comparing the same driver system in two sizes of packages doesn't make much sense to me. I regard small speakers as forced hands, one buys small if one is criminally out of space. A repackaged small system in a large box makes even less sense to me. There's just so much to be squeezed out of them.
I always did say, and now I repeat - the most stupid and short-sighted thing the loudspeaker part of the industry ever did was to cut loose so-called bookshelf speakers. Some, like for eample JBL, still have a few models, and have managed to optimize them for even 3 way systems, so it's hardly surprising that they manage to sound clearer and better focused when done right, which s unfortunately not always the case.
A couple of days ago, by sheer chance, I revamped sweet memories of the yesteryear with the help of a bookshelf, 3 way Dual (Germany) loudspeakers. That model was made in 1978, and after 35 years, it still sounds good, and better than many modern speakers of roughly its own size (500 x 150 x 220 mm, app. 20 x 5.9 x 8.7 inches, H x D x W). An 8 inch bass driver coupled to a 50 mm (2") dome midrange and a 25 mm (1") dome tweeter, sealed box.
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Methinks there's been a fair bit of hard and fast talkin' going on, to push away a few uncomfortable thoughts - 'an inconvenient truth', ...
People are forgetting that chip amps are just an electronic component, to be used intelligently as befits the situation. Want more current? Just parallel them up, to give you 100A peak drive, if the speakers are so demanding. About a year or so ago I played with the idea of creating a 2.4kW into 8R 'monster', using enough chip amps alone to get the job done - as a "design exercise" - moneywise it didn't make sense though ...
Judging what I have listened to, what are my standards are, on the basis of what one has personally experienced, is not a particular smart way to get a handle on things ...
...People are forgetting that chip amps are just an electronic component, to be used intelligently as befits the situation. Want more current? Just parallel them up, to give you 100A peak drive, if the speakers are so demanding. About a year or so ago I played with the idea of creating a 2.4kW into 8R 'monster', using enough chip amps alone to get the job done - as a "design exercise" - moneywise it didn't make sense though ...
Judging what I have listened to, what are my standards are, on the basis of what one has personally experienced, is not a particular smart way to get a handle on things ...
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