The Richard Clark "all amps sounds the same" test

Mr T., what if the veracity of the claim was demonstrated TO YOU beyond doubt, such that the only conclusion you could draw as an intelligent and reasoned person, is that the differences you thought you heard all these years were an illusion? Beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Agreed overall. Maybe an extremely minor impact. But, I like academics! And I do have the belief that if we all have similar logical patterns and similar data people should generally eventually come to the same conclusions - I know I'm a hopeless philosophical optimist in that way, but I enjoy life from this perspective more. I am very aware it rarely happens in real life.

Okay - so I found the perfect amplifier. (Well - this is in the 8-Ohm region, but useful for reasons you will see nonetheless. The Onkyo is still the lowest budget 4-ohm I can find.) It is called the "iSymphony Micro Music System". It is 29.99 and has a whopping 14 watts, and weighs about a fourth of a pound.

At 85 db sensitivity for my 3.6s, If I calculate right, that gets me to around 96 db - not precise calc, but close. Plenty loud!

Then, sitting in Radio Shack holding this thing in my hand, I thought about something. First of all, of course this thing will stink up my living room with its sound at 96 db. Actually - what would be really fun is to see if I could melt it after 4 hrs of 96db playing. Okay - but I was thinking. And this relates to the requirement I am imposing to use Maggies for the test. Again, we have to remember what he is saying very specifically:

9. The amps will not be overloaded during the session from either a voltage or current requirement.

The trick about electrostatics is that they are hard to drive. So if he is going to hook up electronics to the cheap amps to see when they are overloaded and say 'its overloaded, you can't run it this loud' because he is working with the real watt number vs published and it is far less - in this case maybe 4 watts per channel instead of the claimed 14 (14 might be both channels, so that is 7, then lets say they overestimated by 2x), and then with Maggie 20s or 3.6s we end up at some super low db, and I can barely hear the music let alone differentiate it, then that might be the thing!

Megabuck amps don't overload as easily. Even Pass Amps - take the XA100 vs XA100.5 - the 100-not-point-five was an 8-ohm amp and didn't double down into 4 ohms. The 0.5 added that, if I understand correctly by adding output devices to support the increased low-ohm load. So even the 100 vs 100.5, on a 2-ohm or 4-ohm speaker driven really hard should sound different, let alone compared to a 29.99 receiver. The Aleph 3 was tested by Stereophile as stable into 1-ohm and lower loads.

Okay - so this is somewhat interesting. The use of his challenge/research into these issues comes out as statements such as "all amps within their ranges sound the same" and for electrostatics we might find that on the 'possibly correct' side, but *irrelevant*. Because we have to spend a certain amount of money to get an amp where the "within their ranges" produces music loud enough to enjoy.

Shostakovitch's 8th, 3rd movement, for example. I think he is simulating bombs or early WWII rockets coming down during the siege of Stalingrad or some other battle, and for that half second the music might be 95 or 105 db or something, whereas it is 85 before and after. If our requirement is that those parts sound perfect (isn't that why we get expensive stuff - so it is sounds great at the extremes?) So now, the requirement is 105 db stability at 4 ohms. Not easy! That is 85+20 db, so 9*3 is larger than 20, so 1 doubled 9 times is 1->2->4->8->16->23->64->128->256->512. That is a lot of watts! And we are talking real watts, not marketing watts.

I'll try and get a read on the db of the peaks during that piece if I can tonight.

Not sure if I still want to do any tests this weekend, I've resolved in my mind the issue of $50 and $100 dollar amps/receivers compared to Pass equipment.

The issue of a $1k amp vs a $5k amp is another matter that I'm not interesting in starting a discussion on here. That remains open, and his testing methodology might be interesting (in that it adds an EQ and thus suggests that all of what we feel are important differences may in fact be resolved through TACT/Rives type high quality EQ equipment) for that question.

Note that 'tube experts' have failed his test comparing tubes to solid state (let alone Class A to Class B to Class D solid state) because his eq was able to make the SS state amp sound like the tube amp or vice versa, don't know which way he went.

So, in summary, things decided:

1) Personal Claim: His methodology so far seems sound within its own realm - within its stated claims and limitations
2) Fact: Hard to drive speakers require serious amps
3) Fact: Serious amps are generally more expensive
4) Conclusion: It is worth buying expensive amps if you want good sound from hard to drive speakers
5) Conclusion: His 'all amps are the same' testing methodology has nothing to offer us pro *or* con in terms of #2 - 4 above - it doesn't deal with those issues at all

Things still open:

1) Do amps play a part in non-EQ-alterable sound artifacts, like soundstaging for example.
2) If we think they do, then can we ABX our way through identifying them?

Don't discuss those here, however! Lets leave this thread focused on super-cheap amps versus amazing amps used with electrostatics.

Well, that was time well spent, no?

:)

While I was composing Drubin's comment got in there. So 'agreed overall' with both of them - but I was referring to MrTennis originally.

Tests such as Mr. Clark's are pointless in my experience. If he "proves" his premise, it's just a parlor trick anyway. It often takes me weeks to get my head wrapped around how an amp or preamp sounds, and more importantly, how it makes me FEEL when I'm listening to music with it. A test where two or more amps are dialed in to the same sonic signature, are not tested to their extremes, and switched back and forth for comparison in far less time than I take to evaluate an amp throws out most of the criteria and methodology to determine whether one amp sounds better than another. Like I said, a parlor trick.

The limitations he puts on the test are any of the very ones that makes one amp more pleasurable to live with than another, such as how they perform at the frequency extremes, how linear the response is, and how it sounds when pushed, including how much headroom it has on crescendos.

Furthermore, if you think being able to push the Maggies to 96dB is plenty, guess again. If you want it to sound like real music, you want to be able to produce clean, fast peaks above 100 dB even if the average listening level is around 80 dB. Transients, sforzandos, crescendos, drum beats, and all that. A system that can only produce clean peaks to 96 dB is going to have a very limited range of program material that sounds good. I hope you like acoustic folk trios.

Yeah, exactly. I just did the (dynamics, not amp a vs b) test mentioned above, and on the Shostakovitch disk got a couple of 105 db peaks and many, many over 100 db on a nominal level of 78 db. I was using fast / C weighting. Quite dynamic! I probably had it a little high - the level I normally listen to that track with has it opening at 76 db or so. And the meter can't really keep up with the quick changes - so it might be a tiny bit higher.