Who makes

12-02-13: Bifwynne
Suffice to say that a speaker with highly negative (i.e., capacitive) phase angle and low impedance characteristics in the power spectrum (say 30 to 400 Hz ??) can really give a tube amp, even a SS amp, a bad day. That in part makes for a tough to drive speaker that calls for a "current" beast like a Bryston or Krell SS amp.

That is another good point. Is the current output more important than the voltage as that is what gives the speaker its dynamic range? What is voltage good for? It seems like a cheap way make the amp appear to be powerful when reading the specs.
Thanks all. I will have to give this some thought. Previously, I had the simplified idea that if a speaker is over 8 ohm, and especially 16 ohm like those back in the 60's, you need tubes because you just won't get any power out of a reasonable sized ss amp.

"What is voltage good for? It seems like a cheap way make the amp appear to be powerful when reading the specs."

Obviously, there can be no power without voltage, but with home hifi, not all watts are created equally. True powerhouse amps are either large and heavy and use beefy power transformers and in most cases with typical less efficient Class A or even Class A/B amps will also require extensive heat sinks to dissipate the heat created by wasted power.

The exceptions are amps designed to be more efficient, like Class G amps that have been around for many years or more significantly these days, Class D amps, that achieve new frontiers in power amp efficiency and sound quality not possible prior/otherwise.

One of the most unique advantages of a tube amp in regards to how far teh watts go is soft clipping. Tube amps soft clip by nature, which means sonic artifacts of amp clipping is more acceptable to our ears than is the case with most hard clipping SS amps.

Best to avoid clipping altogether IMHO, which in the past was quite hard to avoid in many cases using traditional Class A/B technology. No longer the case with new higher efficiency and more practical (for many compared to a traditional Class A/B monster sized power amp) high power Class D amps.

^^ Cdc, its actually simple math. All speakers are driven by power and if the amp can make the power into the speaker the voltage and current will be exactly the same regardless of the amplifier.

Obviously there is more to it than that- what is going on here is how the amplifier responds to different impedances that will be present in any speaker at various frequencies.

The idea behind the Voltage Paradigm was essentially to deal with box resonance, which is represented by a large impedance peak in the bass region, usually just above the cutoff frequency of the woofer in the box. If you drive that peak with the same power as other frequencies, you will get a one-note bass boom. To control this effect and other issues associated with peaks and dips in the driver response and also due to the crossover, the Voltage Paradigm was created as a sort of standard for driving loudspeakers. You know how a transistor amp can double power as impedance is cut in half? The converse is true too- if you double impedance, the *power* is cut in half. that works nicely for controlling output when dealing with a resonance.

(In the Power Paradigm, the resonance is set up ideally to allow the amplifier to put out the power, but at a frequency that should result in extension of the bottom octave of the speaker's response. This allows a speaker of similar size to go deeper than a speaker designed for the Voltage Paradigm. In both cases, we are looking for flat frequency response, and it is possible that the Voltage Paradigm approach will result in flatter response in some cases. However, the brain has a tipping point wherein distortion will overshadow frequency response errors in its perception of coloration- IOW, a system that has flat frequency response may well sound more colored due to the types of distortion generated. This is why two amps might measure with identical frequency response, yet one might sound bright while the other does not. The Power Paradigm seeks to use this fact to audiophile's advantage while the Voltage Paradigm ignores it.)

Unfortunately, in 99 44/100 percent of all amplifiers, this means that they have to run negative feedback either to create linearity, to create a low enough output impedance or both in the amplifier.

Now that I think of it though, it seems to me that what you are interested in doing is getting a solid state amp that otherwise has the character usually found in tube amps- greater linearity, such that feedback is not required. There are a couple of amps you might look at. The first has been mentioned- Pass Labs. I *think* they may be offering zero feedback amplifiers with a little more power, that otherwise are considered Voltage Paradigm devices. The other amp is the Ayre.

It is not easy to build a reliable solid state amplifier that does not use feedback, which is why most designers don't bother. But Nelson and Charlie did- so you might want to give their amps a listen. That way you can use a Voltage Paradigm speaker and see what you think.

One reason why tubes have increased linearity over solid state has to do with the non-linear capacitive aspects that exist within the layers of almost any solid state output device (which tubes don't have). This non-linear aspect is magnified by current. This is why all solid state amps will have lower distortion and will sound better when driving higher impedance loudspeakers. Yes- they won't make as much power, but they will have more musical finesse. This is also why tubes are still very much in evidence half a century after being declared obsolete.

So you might consider a higher impedance speaker to go with the amplifiers I suggested. That will be giving you a good chance for the better sound within the constraints of solid state technology.

Cdc,

The specs on the full range speakers you use indicate response down to only 125hz.

I suspect most any good quality amp should be able to do a good job with those.

The biggest, clearest challenges where power paradigm comes into play is generally at frequencies lower than 125hz. That's because power requirements increase exponentially with lower frequency for flat response. With bass extension down to only 125hz, and with a very small 3" driver alone, there is likely much less room for amps to differentiate themselves based on power paradigm alone. Not to say they will all sound the same, but the differences may be much less in the case of your specific speakers.

So, its always a good idea to understand the technology involved, but I am just wondering how much practically power paradigm matters really in the case of the OPs current 3" full range speakers specifically.

If a speaker change/upgrade is in the plans at some point, even more reason to clearly understand the options as best as possible before pulling the trigger.

Is the current output more important than the voltage as that is what gives the speaker its dynamic range? What is voltage good for? It seems like a cheap way make the amp appear to be powerful when reading the specs.

voltage & current are duals of each other - where you will find voltage, you'll find current flow. The converse is also true - Where you'll find current, you'll find voltage. Voltage & current cannot exist without each other.
Think of voltage as electric pressure (old engineering texts had voltage as E) similar to water pressure. Current flows from higher electric pressure to lower electric pressure.
When an amp is delivering power into a speaker it's a combination of voltage & current. The voltage impressed (by the amp) at the speaker terminals causes current to flow in the passive x-over components. Depending on the various values of R, C, L in the x-over components, these respective components develop a voltage across them proportional to the music signal. This gets xferred to the speaker drivers. It's the voltage signal that causes pistonic movement in the speaker drivers & that produces sound. No voltage, no sound. So, voltage is good for a whole lot of things. How much current can be output from the power amp depends on how robust its power supply is. So, as Mapman suggested, not all watts are created equal in the sense that 2 100W amps might have vastly different power supplies. in such a case, the power amp with a more robust power supply will be able to drive a more difficult speaker load because it will be able to output more current into the difficult load to create a proportional-to-music-signal voltage for the speaker drivers.
Amps with a weaker power supply cannot drive difficult loads (yet it will still be a 100W/ch amp).