Should I buy a Class A Amp.

I'm with czarivey...if you live in the Sakha region of Russia and you're at 20 degrees below freezing and hope to accomplish the dual task of listening to music while preventing hypothermia, buy yourself a nice Class A amp.   They make wonderful space heaters in the winter.    Otherwise, no thanks.  I personally went Class D and never looked back.    440wpc and you couldn't melt a slice of cheese on it.  Great sound + energy efficiency = happy times.

Class A amplifier's!, don't Look back!

Why would class A operation make an amp slower? Is it inherent in the design? I don't understand these things.
Another question is is the full class A amp a simpler design that just has to be executed well to make sense?

FWIW...Class A: This amp technology can best be described by saying it analyzes and amplifies the full 360 degree cycles (positive to negative) of the incoming audio waveforms in absolute real time. To be able to do that, it’s pretty much running at full power all the time. Whether the music you’re listening to is soft, loud or anywhere in between, the amp is using all of its available energy 100% of the time to reproduce it.

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inna2,067 posts07-19-2016 7:39amWhy would class A operation make an amp slower? Is it inherent in the design? I don’t understand these things.
Another question is is the full class A amp a simpler design that just has to be executed well to make sense?

Class A done right will not be slower, some say this, but it’s just poor design eg: power supply not being up to constant draw on it etc.

And no, a proper designed Class A is more complex, re heat power supply etc.

OK a bit of why I love Class A so much.
I built a pure class A 150w back in the 70’s a three man lift (best amp I or anyone ever heard nothing came close to it) so easy to listen to, huge dynamics, massive sound stage, pinpoint image with depth. But the dynamics were not in a forced way that shot out from the individual drivers, but in whole envelopling way, that washed over you, with it’s bigness and dynamics

But this amp had a 2 x 5kva transformers with 220,000uf capcitance per channel, 18 per channel for memory Hirel EB203 ED204 tranistors, and the big one the whole heatsink was water cooled with it’s own small radiator, variable speed radiator fan and silent water pump to keep the output transistors heat stable,

This amp drove a mates double stacked quad ESL57’s with Decca Kelly ribbons from 10khz up, two x 24" Hartley woofers mounted in the back brick wall, using the next room as the speaker box. The sound was sublime.

The sources were Linn LP12 Black Widow arm and a Stax electrostatic cartridge, that need to be tuned in with it’s own tube supply and scope that took 1/2hr but only stayed in tune for around 1hr before needing to be re-tuned again because humidity changes. We fed that into the amp via my first MkI Lightspeed passive pre.

If you can find them the Mark Levinson ML2 monoblocks are massive but only put out 25w pure class A
They will drive any nasty speaker load, but the speaker has to be reasonably high in efficiency, eg > say 88dB
 


Cheers George