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Amp Review
Phillip_Graham:
Ivan Beaver wrote on Sat, 13 November 2010 20:38
One thing I would like to see that you didn't post-was how well the amps did producing a sine wave for an "extended" period of time. Say 1 or 2 seconds.
Yes regular "music" doesn't have usually have durations that long, but electronic music often does, and at very low freq.
Ivan, if you read more carefully, I think you will find that Langston states clearly that the Powersoft amp performed the best for continuous sine wave output.
Langston wrote about the Powersoft K10
Oh my - this beast is ready for your welding rods and sine waves masquerading as music. One rack space of pure attitude - it's squirrel fans will go into overdrive if necessary, much like the old Crest 9001's, but this amp will just keep belting out continuous power unlike any amp I've ever come across. It also is solid on the Keele short-term tests.
I personally see little point in the extended sine wave tests, unless you were working in a very specific area of music, but your suggestion of a 1 second sine wave test seems reasonable.
John Roberts {JR}:
Phillip Graham wrote on Tue, 16 November 2010 08:27
I personally see little point in the extended sine wave tests, unless you were working in a very specific area of music, but your suggestion of a 1 second sine wave test seems reasonable.
The problem remains that we can not say what is the appropriate test stimulus for everybody. We were doing dynamic or transient headroom tests several decades ago on the hifi side.
I make this suggestion from time to time and the technology is slowly catching up to make this viable.
How about digital recordings of the actual sends to your power amps in use while doing actual gigs. Ideally, one track for each amp bandpass. These glorified board tapes could be definitive amp tests for each customer.
Since the digital files should be accurate and repeatable, you should be able capture a track from the output of the amplifier under test, tweak it for level and delay, then see how well it nulls with the input. Over time multiple people doing this could identify a handful of board tapes that different amps have difficulty with.
For a happy ending to this story, we could email these sound files to the manufacturers and they could fix their amps, or explain why they choose not to support that test tape.
This investigation may help us identify simpler test signals that reveal the amplifiers weak links, or not.. While artificial test signals are hopefully representative, it is always an educated guess.
JR
PS: You could do this null in real time, but many amps already do..... look for a flashing red LED.
Art Welter:
Langston,
Nice testing !
Did you do a musical (or test tone)test to see if the additional 3 dB of headroom the FP14000 has over the PL380 actually translated into 3 dB more speaker output, and if so, what the extra headroom did to the speaker distortion levels on the 18” and 10” drivers?
Art Welter
Josh Ricci:
Awesome data. Thank you for the effort to collect and post it publicly. Bookmarked.
Jeff Babcock:
Phillip Graham wrote on Sat, 13 November 2010 16:38
A single post that is more useful than a year of issues from any of the trade rags, Production Partner excepted.
+1
Great stuff Lang!
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