Ten Percent Distortion?

My personal favorite is the Marantz PM-17 integrated amp that is "only" 60 watts. At sixty watts,into 8 ohms,Marantz lists its total harmonic distortion at less than one one hundredth of one percentage point. Imagine what its watts rating would be at,say,one percent total harmonic distortion?

If it sounds good to you, what difference does it make what the specs say? Do you like it less now?

Seriously, you certainly know why they do it.
Simply to claim higher wattage.
You've been around long enough to know.

Twl....Maybe it's because I've been around so long that distortion is of interest to me. When I started out, harmonic and IM distortion in even the best amps were both over one percent. Technical improvements have made numbers on the order of a few tenths commonplace, and this is the big advance that I see in audio amps. Sure, distortion specs are not the whole story, but (IMHO) an amp that starts out with more than 1 percent distortion has two strikes against it.

Pragmatist...Most amps exhibit an abrupt increase in distortion at some power level (a "knee" in the curve), and you don't gain much more power by citing a higher distortion level.

The sales people at BestBuy seem to know what distortion is, as that seemed to be the only selling point this chump was using to get some poor guy to buy the most expensive Yamaha receiver they had. I tried to convince him that 140 wpc was way more than his 6ohm 91db Yamaha speakers needed to sound loud.

Personally, while you can find a decent sounding component as BestBuy once in a blue moon, the stuff they carry is the antithesis of what almost all of us here are searching for.

Distortion, watts, whatever. I found out a long time ago, these specs mean little in the grand scheme of things. Show me a 250 wpc Panasonic, Sony, or what have you, and I will show you a 50 wpc high end amp that walks all over it when it comes to power. Remember, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Power is speced through an 8 ohm RESISTIVE load, playing a 1 KHz sine wave. But, almost all speakers are reactive(not a flat load), and many are highly so. Further, we listen to MUSIC(not a flat signal), not test tones - at least, most of us do(I do see far too many audiophiles who care more about how their system measures than they do about music) .

So, what do these specs reaallly tell you???

But, yes, for the massfi buyer, I would think that 100 wpc at 0.3% sounds better than 140 wpc at 10%.