Double down, good or bad?


I came across this article on Atma Sphere's website:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/myth.html

In short, Atma Sphere believes having a power amp that is capable of doubling its power when impedance is half is not necessarily a good thing because speakers in general do not have a flat impedance across all freq range.

On paper, it does make sense. Though I am sure speaker designers take that into consideration and reduce/increase output where necessary to achieve the flatest freq response, that explains why most of the speakers measured by Stereophile or other magazines have near flat responses.

But what if designer use tube amps to design his speakers, mating them with solid state should yield higher bass output in general? Vice versa, tube amps yield less bass output at home?

I have always been a tube guy and learned to live with less bass weight/impact in exchange of better midrange/top end. Will one be better off buying the same exact amp the speakers were "voiced" with, not that it will guarantee good sound, at least not to everyone's ear.
semi

Showing 2 responses by semi

Swanny definitely has too much faith in 1 person. I work in leading edge semiconductor industry and over 10 years ago people thought we could not follow Moore's law any more, guess what? If we stop researching and understanding the technology, we will not progress. Still think it's nuff said?

I am curious about amp/speaker impedance interaction, I have owned numerous speakers and amps in my life, in fact I also owned several Pass amps. Nothing is perfect and there is not one amp or speaker that is superior than others, it's always a compromise game. But learning where to compromise is the fun part of this game.
We are not here to argue, we are here to learn from each other's knowledge.

Magfan, glad to see another fab guy. I am a yield guy because of my EE/device physic background, but know process well enough to do my job. As we shrank from 0.5um, we added LDD, halo, and now HKMG to deal with leakage. On top, both N & P stress are going wild and we have far exceeded Moore's law prediction in transistor drive current from linear scaling! All thanks to brilliant minds that work endlessly to produce faster and smaller chips :)

I think amplifier & speaker interaction is still an area that's not well understood when coupled with psycho-acoustic, human do not hear like machine for sure. If there is a perfect amp, Nelson Pass would not have changed and optimized his design constantly. Didn't he think X series amp was perfect when it was introduced several years back, why the X.5 update?