Damping Factor - Interesting article

@audiokinesis   Duke, Thank you so much for your detailed response. I'll copy and paste it over on the Nenuphar speaker thread as I believe it is relevant, with respect amplifier pairings with the Nenuphar full range single driver / speaker.

Your answers (and opinion) and real life findings from your experience as a speaker builder were extremely helpful! Thanks!

I would expect it is not very high output impedance / current output driven, though it may have a relatively low damping factor and may have some current feedback. The issue is most speakers today are designed for an amplifier with high damping factor / low output impedance. Too high of output impedance and your bass response changes, and you screw up the cross-over points.

All that is what I hear with Bakoon amplifiers.Which are class A/B but which are reputed to be zero negative feedback/high output impedance/ current drive/probably low damping factor amplifiers.In simple terms they simply sound incredibly clear and pure.Which I have really only heard elsewhere from expensive SET amps like the

See my later post where I deleted one of my previous posts ... too much on the brain and wasn't paying enough attention. I was never implying that speaker response is not impacted by amplifier impedance. I was more questioning the "constant power" paradigm, not thinking about specific implementations that incorporate aspects of voltage and current control like the ultralinear tube configuration or mixed output feedback implementations in solid-state.

As a speaker designer I can tell you that the difference between the two amplifier paradigms is significant, whether or not output transformers are involved. The relationship between the impedance curve and the speaker’s output level differs depending on the amplifier type, such that if the speaker’s impedance curve has significant peaks and dips, it will measure and sound different with the two amplifier types.

Duke

How does damping factor apply to a zero feedback amp like an ayre .

Generally speaking, the output impedance of a solid state amplifier can be so low with respect to most speakers that it can behave as a voltage source, even if it has no feedback. This is why there are zero feedback class D amps that also behave as a voltage source.


One thing I've noticed a lot while working in high end audio is the phenomena known as 'tight bass'. I regard it as a coloration, since in real life tight bass doesn't seem to exist. The head engineer of Electro-Voice wrote an interesting article that pointed to this many years ago but I've failed to find a link to his article. Essentially though, it points out that no speaker made needs a damping factor more than about 20:1 and many need a damping factor much lower, some as low as 1:10 and you read that right (certain kinds of OB speakers).


The sound difference you hear between systems that have much greater damping factors is often related to distortion rather than FR errors, due to how the brain interprets distortion (if often favors such tonality over actual FR errors or the lack thereof).

BTW:  I really like how Ayre amps, and especially headphone amps sound.