Transient Attack and Amp Design

Transients require large amounts of near instantaneous current without the voltage in the power supply dropping. Essentially the bigger a power reservoir you have the better an amplifier can cope with transients. It matters less how the power is stored (a capacitor bank or a couple of large capacitors compared to the total amount of stored energy). In theory, the lower the internal impedance from the power supply to the output transistors and teh lower the output impedance of the amplifier the less voltage drop will occur when drawing large amounts of current and hence a better transient response (less compression).

It helps to have a speaker with higher impedance. Speakers with dips of quite low impedance will be the cause of most observed problems (rather than the amp).

Shadorne ;
You stated ...
Speakers with dips of quite low impedance will be the cause of most observed problems (rather than the amp).

Can you supply a definition/value of this impedance dip ?

Thank you .

Saki70, the difference between 8 and 4 ohms can be all that it takes; nearly every amplifier made will sound faster (as well as less bright, more natural) on a speaker of higher impedance.

02-16-09: Shadorne
Transients require large amounts of near instantaneous current without the voltage in the power supply dropping. Essentially the bigger a power reservoir you have the better an amplifier can cope with transients. It matters less how the power is stored (a capacitor bank or a couple of large capacitors compared to the total amount of stored energy).

Your comments point to what I suspected. Now does the transistor proximity to the storage cap(s) make a difference? McCormack puts the caps close to output(?) transistors rather than a considerable circuit distance as I saw in my sunfire and marrantz amps. Or are we talking nanoseconds and thus it is not a significant consideration?

BTW, thanks for everyone's comments thus far!

Now does the transistor proximity to the storage cap(s) make a difference?

Atmasphere can speak to that more knowledgeably than I can, but I don't think that would make a significant difference. The concern would not be propagation delay (which would be a few nanoseconds at most, as you speculated), it would be that the inductance of the wiring or printed circuit board traces between the capacitors and the output devices would slow the transfer of energy.

But I don't think that would be a significant effect either. As a very rough ballpark the inductance of one foot of straight wire is around 15 nanoHenries, which would have an impedance of about 2 milliohms even at 20kHz, and much less at lower frequencies. The numbers would be somewhat different if printed circuit board traces were involved, rather than discrete wiring, but I would think they would still be totally insignificant.

What would be of potentially greater significance would be noise pickup on those runs, but that is presumably filtered out by much smaller decoupling capacitors (that have much better high frequency performance than electrolytic storage capacitors), which should be and presumably are located very close to the point of use in the output stage area.

Regards,
-- Al