Why do amps sound different?

Kirkus, How did the loudspeaker designers gain enough leverage to make demands on amplifier designers?

Well, Cyclonicman, legend has it that James Lansing, immediately prior to his untimely death, wrapped a piece of Alnico V in a largish bath towel and "went postal" on the electronics staff at Altec . . .

But seriously, they did it by designing speakers that people wanted to buy, and that were more demanding loads for the amplifier. 40 years ago, virtually all amplifiers had 16-ohm output taps, and today, an amplifier's performance into a 16-ohm load isn't even a footnote. I guessing this is because, er, how many modern 16-ohm hi-fi speakers can you think of?

A great example is the Apogee full-range ribbons I alluded to. The two things that people remember about them are that they sounded amazing, and that they blew up amps. I have heard from a few sources about how these loudspeakers influenced Mark Levinson's amplifier designs . . . I'm not so sure that the timeline works out for that to be true, but the Apogees definately had a huge influence on the current output capability of "flagship" solid-state amps of the 1980s and 1990s.

Hi Kirkus, I'm not the one who has created these paradigms; they simply are what is. And for the record, you would be hard pressed to build a tube amp of the type you describe! Even if you ignore the taps of the output transformer, most tube amps will exhibit the constant power quality anyway. The taps are there to allow optimized loading on the tubes- its not the other way around.

You are correct in that the Voltage Paradigm was being developed about 60 years ago- during the 50s and 60s... **almost** 60 years ago. That bit of history probably needs to be in the paper so thanks for pointing that out. I don't like to think that the 1960s are that distant yet :)

FWIW the Apogees and Lowthers are both Power paradigm technology. If you want a better comparison, compare the B&W 802s (needs a 'voltage source' amplifier) to the Lowther (needs constant power).

Apogees are in the Power paradigm as their impedance curve has very little to do with resonance in a box and so does not exhibit the classic impedance curve of such a device. Being a nearly resistive load, zero feedback tube amps work great with them if they can deal with the impedance (some Apogees are a simple 4 ohm load, others as you know are quite a bit lower, but other than that they are easy to drive)- a set of ZEROs provide the access for that.

Paul Bolin (at the time with TAS) reviewed a set of zero feedback triode amplifiers (and gave them a Golden Ear Award) using the Apogees for his speakers. Prior to that another TAS reviewer ran his 1 ohm Apogee Full Ranges with a zero feedback triode amplifier (which made 100 watts) and gave good marks to it as well. I had the opportunity to hear that setup, and the 100 watts seemed to be plenty of power- they were at once very relaxed, detailed and with plenty of authority on the bottom end. A fabulous speaker!

I've tried to school myself as best I can about this subject, and I appreciate your input- the more this issue gets airtime I think the better for the art.

Hi Atmasphere . . . my main point is that hi-fi speaker designers simply do not consider an amplifier to be anything other than a voltage source, and that they never have. Further, it seems obvious to me that amplifiers have historically been intended to operate as voltage sources. And please believe that I'm not categorically critizing amplifiers that deviate from this practice, but I believe that a high output impedance, as an intentional, acceptable goal, is a completely modern phenomonon that is unrelated to what all but a very few speaker designs are anticipating.

The impedance at which an amplifier produces maximum power output, again, is completely non-sequitur. When I completed the restoration on the Marantz Model 2s currently in my system, I measured the output impedance at about 0.18 ohms from the 4-ohm taps - for all intents and purposes, a voltage source. This was the only tap I measured, but let's say that the 8-ohm taps have about 0.4 ohm output impedance. I would guess that my "4-ohm" Mezzo Utopias (typical reflex cabinet) would range from about 4-15 ohms. The modification of the speaker impedance on the voltage response of the amplifier would thus be about 0.3dB from the 4 ohm taps, and about 0.6dB from the 8-ohm taps . . . very little difference between the two. My point is that even if the load is mismatched and grossly affects the maximum power output, these 1950s-era amplifiers behave overwhelmingly as a voltage source, NOT a power source or a current source - if they're operating below clipping.

If I was to look for evidence that loudspeaker designers viewed an amplifier as a current source, here's what I would expect to find: Filter values and woofer conjugates in crossover networks that are calculated with the expectation of a high source impedance. Parallel resonant networks inside crossovers to dampen the impedance peak(s) from the cabinet/port. Standard models for calculating woofer responses from Thiele/Small parameters, that include a high source impedance. A specification from a speaker manufacturer that reads something like "recommended amp output impedance: 2-6 ohms". If I've been living under a rock, please tell me, but I've NEVER seen any of the above.

I chose the Apogee as an example of voltage-source thinking because I remember it being a very capacitive load, not simply low-impedance; maybe my memory fails me. But it doesn't surprise me that a capacitive speaker could sound nice from a high output impedance SET amp, for a couple of reasons. First, there's nothing like a high output impedance to keep an amplifier within its optimum current range . . . in the same way as a series resistor! Ditto for avoiding stability issues that many amps exhibit into capacitive loads. And third, I could easily see a capacitive load causing a resonant peak in the output transformer that might kinda offset the Ohm's-law HF rolloff. But again, I don't think the Apogee designers were anticipating these conditions.

Anyway, I find this interesting because there are so many "high-end" speakers out there that leave me scratching my head as to why they don't sound good to me at all, and I wonder if this is the way they're "supposed" to sound.

Kirkus, the Acoustic Research AR-1 is a good example of a speaker that was designed with intention to be used by a 'current source' amplifier. They recommended an amplifier with an output impedance of 7 ohms. Sure enough, it actually does sound better with such a thing.

The AR-1 was the first production acoustic suspension loudspeaker.

When speakers were first created, so you didn't have to wear headphones, there was nothing out there that was practical except horns. This was a long time ago- 1910s and 1920s. The only amplifiers around were triode class A zero feedback. They were the only game in town. Around WW2 the idea of negative feedback was developed, and the debate around it at that time was the 'listener fatigue' that often resulted.

The effects of odd-ordered harmonics were not understood but the effects of them were.

After the war the feedback debate continued. In the meantime, loudspeakers continued to be built that expected a fairly high output impedance out of the amplifier. Many of those speakers (Altec, JBL, Klipsch, EV, Lowther, Quad) are collectable and sought after today.

Feedback began gaining ground in the 1950s with the main proponents being Marantz, McIntosh, Fisher and Electro-Voice. EV and Fisher in particular were cognizant of some of the underlying issues and often recommended variable current feedback as opposed to voltage feedback. Variable, on account of it does not work the same way, depending on the intention of the speaker designer.

In 50-60 years since, we are still facing the same issues. How a voltage source does not work with some speakers is a transistor amplifier on an ESL- Sound Lab for example. Sound Labs have an impedance curve based on a capacitive nature. When a transistor amplifier with high feedback (voltage source) is put on a speaker like this, the highs are too pronounced and there is no bass. The speaker has an impedance over 50 ohms in the bass. Put a tube amp (which tries to make constant power) on this load and all of a sudden the speaker is making bass.

The highly reactive nature of horns is another technology that does not work so well with 'voltage source' amplifiers. Often the back EMF produced by the speaker gets into the feedback loop of the amp, causing excess harmonic generation- certainly not a lot, but enough so that horns get the reputation of being harsh and honky. Anyone who is running a 'current source' (zero feedback) amplifier on horns knows this reputation is ill-deserved.

Another sign that the 2 paradigms exist is amplifier specification. How often have audiophiles experienced the phenomena of the specs saying nothing about how the amp sounds? In fact, sometimes a negative correlation is perceived (higher distortion on paper--> better sound).

Speaker designers have been designing for 'current source' amplifiers for a long time. If anything, there are more of them now then there were 50 years ago (there are more tube amplifier manufacturers in the US now then there were in 1958...). So this issue is very much with us.

At the crux of the paradigm debate are the rules of human hearing. On the one hand (Voltage Paradigm), the only rules respected are human limits of hearing (20Hz-20Khz) and decibels, primarily resulting in a set of inaudible benchmarks that have little to do with how we hear. OTOH (Power Paradigm) the RHH (Rules of Human Hearing) are the *only* thing that matters, eschewing the bench measurements as having no meaning if they mean nothing to the human ear.

This is at the root of the tube/transistor debate and the objectivist/subjectivist debate. Its not that it does not exist- it **is** that it won't go away quietly, no pun intended... :)