Pro vs. Consumer Equipment

Professional poweramps usually great at higher than home volumes. Class D often used in pro poweramps is designed to feed tremendous power with small heat dissipation losses but brings very large distortions at low volume levels.

Bryston and Manley do manufacture professional poweramplifiers but they're realy created as home amp and t certainly costly. Some small venues however do acquire those for small amplifications of voice with unamplified instruments.

Can't tell anything for preamp domain but I guess it designed basically to the same basically to give out as much output voltage as possible for poweramp driving stages.

I however stand for pro-grade wires that are very inexpencive for interconnects and speakers as well with no compromise for those in "nice snakes" or even better(especially if stripped to see wires inside). I now use two runs of 14AWG Carroll Command for bi-wired setup which is a killer wire with silver-plated cooper strands.

I still have my old JBL 200 studio monitors and Crown D150 amp from way back. A year or so back I dug them out while I was waiting for my new ( used ) Speakers to arrive. Trust me don't look back!
They play loud and have great bass,but thats all I can really say compared to "Todays" stuff. Though its still fun to dig em out once in awhile.....

Thorman is right on the money. Most of that stuff sounds horrid unless you're looking for sheer brute volume. This is due to the fact that these amps are not built for sonics, they are built for rugged reliability under any / all load and thermal conditions. They are the type of amps that give SS a bad name and should be avoided unless you simply need high spl's and / or gobs of power. Sean
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PS... I've not heard EVERY "pro" amplifier, but i've worked with enough to know that i would NOT want to use them at home. At least not as a "full range" amp.

It's interesting that the ART amps have such strong advocates--there must be an exception to every rule.

The JBL pro speakers I referenced included a 15-18" woofer (I can't recall the exact size) and two horns (midrange and tweeter). The McIntosh was a tube amp as was the Crown preamp (at the time, Crown produced consumer components).

Marakanetz, thanks for sharing your views on cables. I wonder whether others have had good luck with pro cables.

While i've never heard the ART SLA-1, i read as much about it as i could find on the net. From what i can tell, it is pretty much the same thing as their DIO dac. That is, ten pounds of parts crammed into a two pound box.

In order to obtain the power output that they are and not run into thermal problems, the amp has to be biased quite low. There just isn't any heatsinking / chassis that would allow a higher level of bias. If it was biased higher, the amp would be going into thermal shutdown on a regular basis. As a general rule, low bias amps tend to sound a lot less refined, lack black backgrounds and do not offer the amount of "air" that a good high bias amp can offer.

On top of this, the power supply has to be compromised for the same reason i.e. small chassis size. There just isn't enough room to get a good sized transformer or filter caps in there. To prove / support this point of view, the amp is rated at 100 wpc @ 8 and only 130 wpc @ 4 ohms.

The logical deduction to all of this is that the amp would lack bass impact, definition and control. I would also expect it to get noticeably "smeary" as drive levels were increased, moreso as the impedance of the speaker were dropped. This all has to do with the lack of available current with limited power supply reserve.

While i know that i've not heard the amp and some of you are probably rolling your eyes / saying what a "dork" i am for jumping to conclusions, you just can't get around the basics of good amplifier design without some phenomenally fancy circuitry being required. Since phenomenally fancy circuitry typically requires a lot of R&D ( research & development ), the end result is typically a product that is quite costly to bring to market.

Given the price / size of this unit and the rated power output, it is probably nothing more than a cut-corner design that takes up minimal space. It was probably built to a price point ( i would assume VERY much so ) and to suite the non-demanding nature that one finds driving small monitors listened to in near-field fashion in a studio. In such a situation, volume levels are never real high and the amp doesn't have to control a large driver with a lot of reflected EMF being generated. As such, it probably works fine for the market that it was intended for ( after all, Studio Line Amp is the name ) but would not be suited for a true "high fidelity" system. Sean
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