Focus on 24/192 Misguided?.....

Bombaywalla, Making amplifiers cutoff frequency at 20kHz means that phase shift at this frequency will be in order of 45 degree causing bad summing of harmonics. My small Rowland 102 amp has 65kHz bandwidth with about 22deg phase shift at 20kHz. New Rowland amp model 625 ($15k) has bandwidth of 350kHz. Mr. Jeff Rowland knows what he's doing (I'd like to think). As for 50kHz - a lot of power amps have -3dB bandwidth of 50kHz:

All Atmasphere amps: >100kHz
All Rowland Amps: >65kHz
All Cambridge Audio Amps: >50kHz
All Krell Amps >95kHz
All Classe Delta Series: >100kHz
All Classe CT series: >80kHz
All Luxman Amps: >100kHz
All Parasound Halo Amps >100kHz
All Parasound NewClassic Amps >50kHz
etc.

But if you won't to spend 2nd mortgage you'll find amps like:

MBL Reference 9011: 320kHz
Goldmund Mimesis 8: 800kHz +/-1dB
Soulution 710: 1MHz

hi-res may not be necessary according to theory, however in practice modern D/A chips behave better with it (digital filtering), and as a result it sounds better.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

According to all the engineers and tests and specs, vinyl does not sound as good as a CD right? But so many people would prefer the sound of vinyl and/or tubes over SS amps and a CD player. So I guess all this talk about specs and cutoff freq., etc. is just a numbers thing. Will it tell you if one amp sounds better to a person than another?

The same recording transfered to 16/44 does not sound as good as the same recording transfered to a higher resolution whether it is SACD or 24/96 (or 24/192). Can we move on and try to get recordings put out on something higher than 256k?

Kijanki, do you know what the power bandwidth is on ARC amps, particularly the VS-115. Freq. response is approx. 100K, but I don't know if that is the same as power bandwidth.