Does anyone care to ask an amplifier designer a technical question? My door is open.


I closed the cable and fuse thread because the trolls were making a mess of things. I hope they dont find me here.

I design Tube and Solid State power amps and preamps for Music Reference. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, have trained my ears keenly to hear frequency response differences, distortion and pretty good at guessing SPL. Ive spent 40 years doing that as a tech, store owner, and designer.
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Perhaps someone would like to ask a question about how one designs a successfull amplifier? What determines damping factor and what damping factor does besides damping the woofer. There is an entirely different, I feel better way to look at damping and call it Regulation , which is 1/damping.

I like to tell true stories of my experience with others in this industry.

I have started a school which you can visit at http://berkeleyhifischool.com/ There you can see some of my presentations.

On YouTube go to the Music Reference channel to see how to design and build your own tube linestage. The series has over 200,000 views. You have to hit the video tab to see all.

I am not here to advertise for MR. Soon I will be making and posting more videos on YouTube. I don’t make any money off the videos, I just want to share knowledge and I hope others will share knowledge. Asking a good question is actually a display of your knowledge because you know enough to formulate a decent question.

Starting in January I plan to make these videos and post them on the HiFi school site and hosted on a new YouTube channel belonging to the school.


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Showing 3 responses by nitewulf

@ramtubes I am still a bit hazy on the power versus gain issue.  If you increase the gain, are you not increasing the power output of the amp? So what then affects the power output, the speaker impedance only? In that case, how do we ensure that the amplifier is outputting power within the bandwidth where it has the least amount of distortion? As you stated, and can be seen from measurements, typically harmonic distortions start to increase at the upper and lower limits of the design bandwidths (20HZ and 20KHZ for arguments sake) along with increasing power output. 
@4krow I believe most of the Japanese integrated amps have tone controls: Luxman, Accuphase and the newer Yamahas. I am a fan personally, my vintage Kenwood sounds so good. There is definitely something undeniably cool about switches, knobs and levers. All this purist approach is fine and good, but its also boring as hell.