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Amp damping factor?

OK need some technical info. I was told by a reputable source that I should buy an amp that had a high damping factor >100 and preferably closer to 150-200. In looking at this in the specs for many units it seems this might be over-rated. I have been looking at some vintage Mac gear and their numbers are like 10-40? Is that an age thing and modern equipment is just that much better? Or is there a tradeoff I dont know about?
joekapahulu
rwwear
2,873 posts
 
The folks at Krell told me years ago that damping factor was not really that important.
shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
This comes up regularly. A factor of 50 is enough. A factor of 500 means very little in terms of added advantage over a factor of 50. (Remember if you impedance drops to 2.6 ohms at the lowest point then 50 will still get you adequate damping but a factor of 10 will not.
magfan
1,583 posts
 
A high 'Q' speaker will sound under damped even if the amp has a damping factor of 10,000 or more.
Voltage source amps will have hi damping,
Current source amps, not so much.

I suspect that a critically damped speaker ('Q'= .707) will be good even with low damping amps.....most tube gear.
almarg's avatar
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almarg
9,670 posts
 
Keep in mind that many amps with extremely high damping factors achieve that by means of large amounts of feedback, which results in several well-recognized negative side-effects. These include transient intermodulation distortion, which results in sloppy handling of sharp transients.

Regards,
-- Al
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