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All Amps Sound the Same....

A guy posted this on another forum:

"This is my other expensive hobby and while I agree with you about low end receivers, once you get to mid-priced (~$600-1000 street price) multichannel receivers you're into pretty good gear...Keep in mind that an amplifier sounds like an amplifier and changing brands should add or subtract nothing to/from the sound and that going up the food chain just adds power output or snob appeal to a separate amplifier...These days most audiophiles either use a good quality multichannel receiver alone or use a mid-priced multichannel receiver to drive their amps even for 2-channel."

Wow, where do they come up with this? Lack of experience?
russ69
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,477 posts
 
Jeff_jones - it is not that simple. SS designs 50 years ago were horrible with huge negative feedback and a lot of TIM distortions. Sanity is slowly coming back but amplifier design is not a trivial thing especially with budget constraints. The fact is that even for $1500 today you can find very decent and very horrible sounding amps. We tend to prefer the first kind.
russ69's avatar
russ69 OP
3,579 posts
 
If all amps sound the same, then we should recommend that everybody buy a 500 watt a channel job as their first and only amp they will ever need. How come the guys that think all amps sound the same never own/owned a big/expensive amp?
bighead63
53 posts
 
IMO comparing an amp to a mutlichannel AVR is not anywhere in the same area.

The statements the OP posted to me come from someone not very fimilar with the hobby like we are.

For instance it would be a tough day for an AVR to drive certain speakers and I think one would be asking themselves why does my AVR blow up when I choose to run a 2 ohm load on it?

The box stores like Dumb Buy and alike push AVR's as that is what most people go in looking for. Even HTIBs because someone can't even understand the difference between an AVR and a HTIB.

That and when people are listening to crap thru bose systems what would they know? They think they got the best out there due to name. Heck I even work with a kid who was a Bose store manager and tells me I'm stupid for buying audio like I do.

In the end, to each their own. I wish more people could wake up and hear what good SQ is like but then that would mean they would have to take the time to listen in such a busy world.
jedinite24's avatar
jedinite24
1,503 posts
 
I think whomever posted the stuff in the OP was just trying to start a fight or rile up folks.
psag
518 posts
 
I haven't done direct A/B comparisions in my listening room. But, my guess is that at least some of the affordable multichannel amps from Yamaha, Marantz, Denon and others are competitive with the audiophile offerings of smaller manufacturers. Particularly with speakers that are easy to drive, which is the current trend in speaker design. After all, do people really believe that a Jaguar outperforms a Honda, or that a Rolex outperforms a Timex?
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