Sure would be nice if we could go, "I'd like 300 dollars of sound stage please."
"How much sound quality can I get for 20 bucks a month?"
"I'll just do some comparison shopping."
"How much sound quality can I get for 20 bucks a month?"
"I'll just do some comparison shopping."
Dude, you exhaust me.
DF and source Z are the same thing. Even SS amps may not have a flat source Z curve. Many speakers have significant dips in impedance, not one is ever flat.
Peak current…matters when you draw…peak current. Most listening is done with less than 10W average to the speakers, peaks well below max.
I don’t have time to address your other points.
Unlikely your hearing is not up to hearing speakers effects or interaction with an amp (if any). Most of that happens between 100Hz and 10kHz.
Things can always get better, its just a question of what limitations you want to pay to get rid of.
Good grief, no. Look at the impedance plot of pretty much any speaker with a crossover in it. "Good" is it stays around 50% of 8 ohms. Not many do. Take your favorite speaker and google "impedance graph".
Power rating is regulated by several trade organizations. The procedure is petty well defined. What's not is how to state the specs. Power ratings sometimes are stated into 4 ohms, which makes it look bigger. But to say it's marketing needs is just not fair.
Above you said, "Most speakers with reasonable, mostly resistive, loads do not "frequency interact" with an amplifier's impedance. " which is wrong, but now you say that the load affects the power and current making amps sound different. Well, it can't be both. And we don't need to talk about current when we're talking about power, which includes the current parameter. You know this. Are you trying to bring up dynamic power? Never specified, but measurable. And I doubt it.
I'm not countering the argument that "amps sound different", but your reasoning is a bit out here.
I'm thinking you don't actaully want those answers.....right? And my first question would be "Do they really", proven by significant ABX/DBT. And if so, then why?
Huh? The 70s was a VERY different era in many ways. Why....um...why????
Two amps from the 70s sound different. Big deal, and yeah of course. Apart from the late 1960s, the 1970s was perhaps the darkest full decade for SS amps. That doesn't prove or disprove that "amplifiers sound different", and besides, I agree they can.
One Maggie impedance plot I found is here:
https://www.stereophile.com/content/magnepan-magneplanar-mg16qr-loudspeaker-measurements
So...not exactly a resistive load, eh?
Tried...how? Connected them up and listened, or ABX/DBT? You know where I'm going.
I'm not sure that things can really get much better. Or what the limitations are right now, if any.
We have a piano in another room that my wife plays. So, I know what a live piano sounds like in my house. And a piano coming from my speakers sounds almost exactly the same. Not quite, but so close that if you close your eyes you might be fooled into thinking it was actually in the room with you. It really is that good.
And in the living room with the actual piano there is no room treatment. Just the very thick carpet and upholstered furniture like in my listening room. So, if I don't need any room treatment for the piano in the living room why would I need it in a different room with essentially the same furnishings.
things always do get better IMHO and IME. it depends on you whether you're looking for a better performance from your system or not.
its perfectly OK to be happy with what you got and just enjoy the music.
The 70s showed a huge move forwards in solid state technologies and design. Those fancy Sony VFET transistors were designed at that time,, high slew rates, the importance of IM and feedback on audio quality. Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, the STASIS circuits, Linn, Infiniti all came out of the 70s. It was actually a glorious decade... great music too... Even punk music come out from the 70s!
...If you want a bad decade for audio quality, take the 80s... Red Book, Crappy "boom boom" music, terrible design of component,s Japanese High End brands hurting.
Then, the Sansui I have on the shelf, has a much improved design, parts ,solid state physics, design than the four year old Marantz! And it sounds that much better.
The Maggies require current. You agree with me, huh? So an amplifier that can deliver CURRENT has the chance sound really good. That just blows away the idea that amps don't sound the same.
Look, the OP just needs better front end. He comes into diyAudio with a entry level AVR and a pair of nice, inexpensive DIY speakers and wants advice to make his audio system project a larger soundstage.
The fix is simple, his speakers are in the right place, he listens in the near field...
(1) Stop hoping to get soundstage for 128KB MP3
(2) Get a better front end. If you don't want to pay a lot, Go used, DIY -or better used DIY.
Other than that, there is nothing we can do...
BTW, even though there are uniform standards for "stereo power amplifiers", it is still up to the marketing guys to decide how much power to publish. I gave you an example... My Sansui G-7500 is rated at 90 wpc, but it puts out almost 110.... so, it's underrated, see?
Honestly, I don't know if you're trolling at this point... or just have really bad hearing.
If you don't have room treatment in the room with the piano, what you'll be hearing is the piano, more specifically, the piano in that specific room.
If you were to record that piano in that room, and were to play it back in your listening room on your speakers, what would you hear?
- your piano, in that specific room it's in, combined with the listening room. Get the difference? The specifics of your listening room are superimposed on every recording played back there. If you threat that room, you stand a better chance of hearing the recording of the piano, with (just) the room it is in. That's all...
Up to you where your preference lies, but listening to an orchestra will be similar to the above... your listening room will have it's influence on top of the recording,
which means that the recorded ambience will be mixed with the queues (size specific queues of your room to be exact) of your listening room.
I like Redbook. I think a lot of the problem with sound quality in the 80's was the sudden mass availability of cheap recording devices and studios, though I guess that does have some upside too!
DG went all digital. They had gobs of money.
Avoid anything from DG marked as DDD from that era.
Well, I'm not trolling. Everything that I have been reporting is exactly as I perceive it to be.
So maybe I do have really bad hearing. In fact, one of my ears does test rather poorly for both the low and high ends. The other ear has a much wider frequency response band.
And maybe all this worry about speakers and equipment is unnecessary for me, since it might not make much difference. Nevertheless, I do hear what I consider to be very high-quality audio. I guess the real test is to see if other people with better hearing would agree.
I do try to do that in general, but then there's David Bowie's Let's Dance, which while it could sound better is still a great CD. Not sure if that's DG. I didn't mean redbook for recording, there aren't enough bits for that, but as a format I like it fine!
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OK, usually the coax digital out is better than the toslink. So that is good. Usually, the basic level AVR's don't give you many options for the digital input. They are meant to be easy for consumers to set up. Still, even using the AVR's internal DAC's it should sound a bit better than the compressed web streams. But I have noticed that a lot of the new AVR's are going to digital amplifiers. This could be part of the problem. Inexpensive digital amps historically have only been used for low frequency applications because it has been expensive to get good sound from them at higher frequencies.