Damping Factor - Interesting article

I have paid very close attention to damping factor over the years starting with when I acquired my large Ohm Walsh speakers that use a single 12” driver operating Walsh style with wave bending.


I had read the large 12” driver benefitted from high damping and have found that to be very true.

I started off with a Carver m4.0t amp that is designed to emulate a tube amp with relatively high output impedance. This did very well with larger Maggie’s and modest tower design B&W P6 but I found I could do better with the Ohms.

I landed on the Class D Bel Canto amps which bring a higher level of control to the 12” Walsh style drivers. Everything is clearer and better especially bass which became clearly nuanced and articulate compared to prior.

I’ve used other smaller monitor speakers with these amps as well and find the benefits of the higher damping varies more there speaker to speaker.

Dynaudio contour monitors benefited but to a lesser degree. Small less extended Triangle Titus monitors even less. I run kef ls50s off the amps now and sound is very detailed and articulate. I heard these prior a few years back when someone brought a pair over to hear and found they sounded as described off my Class D amps but were actually quite bad, very flat and muddy, off a pair of tad hibachi amps I had at the time which were a zero feedback SS design. Huge difference with highly damped Class D versus zero feedback/high output impedance.


So the correlation between damping factor and sound quality seems to exist at least based on my experience.


Also I should note I tried a different more highly damped Class A SS amp prior to the Class D and yes brightness was an issue there possibly due to the bad harmonics associated with higher damping SS amps.
All this is a big reason I am a sold Class D fanboy these days. Especially if you have larger speakers that need a beefy high current SS amp to take vice-like control of the drivers

What amplifer are you talking about turnbrown? Some amps will have something like DF >400 at 20hz, I have seen some say DF > 300 20hz - 20khz @ 8Ohm. Use the Excel spreadsheet from Benchmark and input the numbers from your speakers. What Benchmark was showing is speakers that range from 2.6 Ohm to 18 Ohm DF of >200 was .1dB difference. Some like Pass use a low DF which produces higher dB in the Bass depending on speakers used.

djones512,195 posts06-06-2020 8:41am"What amplifer are you talking about turnbrown?...."

Marantz Integated Amps are a good example of DF specs with no load or frequency specified. Hegel, who prides themselves on very high DFs, list no load or frequency in their specifications.  

If there is benefit from going from 12awg to 11awg as Benchmark suggests, then why not go to 9awg?

In the Benchmark paper it says most amplifier specs assume 8 Ohm whether that's true for Hegel and marantz I have no idea. What's interesting to me about the article is they are saying low DF of 10 or high as 10,000 is not an issue damping of driver motion but a low DF can affect the sound of speakers because of variations in impedance of the speaker. I notice the Hegel integrateds show a DF of 4000, I can't imagine a speaker bad enough to for the DF to matter at 4000.