With all the recurring talk about high quality amplifiers, I was wondering if we could pin down a definition for good clean power. How do you know if you have clean, pure, power. Undoubtedly it can be felt in the quality of the speakers, but how do you measure "clean power"? Which amplifiers deliver more clean power than others? Does it have to do with the amount of wattage an amp produces, i.e. the more wattage, the higher level of purity? Is the term "clean" as subjective as opinions about speaker brands and performance?

 

this will stire large debates but on most car audio boards you will hear all amps sound the same. tube amps sound "warm" apparently because they have more distortion. sq is subjective remember.

 

I thought vacuum tube amps were the cleanest you could get....

 

just what i hear...not literally.

 

tube amps produce a level of 'coloration' - which is not exactly considered
true accurate amplification, an amplifier should do nothing but amplify an audio signal without introducing noise or distortion into the signal, but its pleasant nontheless and many audiophiles dig'm

Keep in mind there are very few actual tube amps out there, most are some sort of hybrid

 

Yeah I would call clean no coloration to the sound. At the highest levels of audio, some would begin to try to measure "cleanliness" by the transparency of the speakers (you can argue if amps can have anything to do with it or not). Thats my opinion of clean, at least.

 

Ok, so coloration, is that a subjective term too? Since obviously you are dealing with sound waves that have no color.

 

The totally totally unscientific test I did regarding coloration used a few different amps right after one another in the exact same system. We had it to the point where there were all powered up and we just switched RCA's and speaker wire. Note that these were not all of the same power rating, but that wasn't exactly the purpose (to me) of the listening. Let's see, we were playing with one of the ESX 1752's (that I still own and run to this day), a Memphis Belle the old "non class D" one (just using front channels), a lil old Zapco Z or C 100 (rated 50 x 2), and a Crossfire CFA 602.. Above and beyond power (3 of the 4 were putting out very similar power...150 -175 x 2), there was definately a slight difference in sound. I thought it was most noticeable with the Memphis Belle, still a very decent amp, but I heard some difference. While the Zap was way underrated for my application, I chose the ESX partly because I personally liked the sound. We're prolly splitting haris here, as I really feel is the case when choosing between decent amps, but there was a slightly different sound with the different amps. A roomante and a few friends with totally untrained ears agreed. I certainly don't have golden ears (prolly did too much damage when I was young ) so I don't know honestly if the ESX I chose was the least colored or I liked the coloration??? who knows?...but there was a difference above and beyond any slight power differences....That is what I personally think of when I say coloration.

 

Sorry, I thought that there WAS NO noise/distortion in a vacuum tube. Just going on what my teachers told me.

drew

 

If you look at the specs for a tube amp the SN ratio and THD numbers are usually worse than solid state amps. Still the true single ended tube amps are considered the most transparent and musical amps in the world...shows how important specs are. Musicallity has more to do with the quality of components in the signal path than it does with the specs. I've listened to countless home audio gear that measured awesome and sounded horrible. To complicate matters, one component might sound awesome in one system yet sound bad in another.

I guess I would consider sound "Clean" if your soundstage was huge, deap, seamless, and transparent. I normally compare it to different high end home setups I have spent time listening to.

 

IMHO I think clean has more to do with "How clean is the signal from the RCA's to the amp". If the amp receives a sh!tty signal, guess what? It's gonna reproduce a sh!tty signal. So I feel how well the H/U, EQ or surround sound processes the signal is more important. But that doesn't mean that there aren't amp's out there can kill a clean signal & vise versa. But from my own hands on experience I can tell a bigger difference in SQ (bad or worse) between H/U's then I can with amplifiers that are some what in the same class.

 

A watt is a watt.

Distortion and such is completely different than power. It has to do with other parts of the amp.