"Slam"--what is it, is it really accurate?

Thanks much for all the replies. I'd like to ask if you think my McCormack DNA-1 has the cojones to produce slam with reasonably efficient speakers? I think it is rated at 150 watts/channel into 8 ohms, and 300 watts into 4 ohms. My speakers are the(fairly old now) Legacy Audio Signature II, which are supposed to be very efficient, but I have never found them to produce significant slam on drum shots, or be all that dynamic on transients in general.

What I don't have a clue about is whether the Signatures are capable of slam/dynamics given a much more powerful amp, or if I would benefit more from a new/different set of main speakers. Any thoughts much appreciated.

@ Mapman,

Thanks much for the thoughts. Just for grins, could you name a starting point in the way of a class D amp? It would be interesting to compare a state of the art class D amp to my McCormack DNA-1 rev. A. And even if I were to find an increase in slam/dynamics with the class D, I would want to make very sure that I did not lose any of the mid and high frequency "niceness" that this McCormack has.

@ Genjamon,

Thanks for the informative reply! While I have no doubt that your points about certain aspects of electronics are factors in production of "slam", I must note that some of the demos where I have heard and felt "slam" have been at very much mid-fi retailers, who I am confident were not employing any sophisticated, high end pre-amps and/or amps. No doubt, the amps they used in such demos were likely very powerful, but my guess is that the biggest factor in the demos I heard was the speaker being used.

With my limited financial resources, I would be looking for the most practical, affordable way to achieve the most uncompressed, and dynamic presentation. Hence my question about whether "slam" would be mostly a function of speakers or amplification.

Kiddman wrote:

"Remember that in real life the SPL of individual drums being hit reasonably hard (slam would imply more than soft gentle drumwork) is going to be over 100db. Well over. Most speakers simply don't have the ability to convey music that loud without a lot of distortion. Most audiophile speakers just won't do it."

So, could that be why some are drawn to large cabinet speakers with light, fast cones such as Daedalus? I'm beginning to think the ability of speakers to achieve that sense of dynamic "liveness" may be as or more important to a sense of realism than frequency response accuracy.

After I recently was at another audiogoner's house and saw him working with his banana connections in his setup, I decided to take a look at the bananas on my low frequency run. What I did was to pull a bit more of the cable through the connector and fold the entire cable over on one side of the connector.

What this resulted in was that upon screwing the banana ends back down, it was a much tighter connection and much harder to screw them all the way down. I did this at both the amp and speaker ends of the cables.

Lo and behold, after this free tweak, there is clearly more impactful bass attack. Should have done this years ago!

Now, I just purchased a much more powerful amp, Krell FPB400cx, which should arrive next week. I will be interested to see if the introduction of the Krell will provide an additional incremental increase in bass slam, weight, and control over my current McCormack amp.

@ Mapman,

Yes, while I was at it, I re-tightened the high frequency cable connections. My high frequency cables are Morrow SP2 with the nude termination. My amp terminals have a hexagonal segment, so this time I used a wrench to tighten down the connections at the amp tighter than I previously had done by hand. I also tried to really tighten down the connections on the speaker as well. I do believe this significantly improved my highs and mids.