Amp damping factor?

Too high of a damping and the bass is thin, lacking in authority, and not very musical. Too high is relative depending on the speakers it is matched to. My tube amp has a damping factor of about 11, and the bass on the Legacy Whisper is stunning, better than the SS 600wpc Legacy amplifier also used with the Whisper. Damping is also like a "brake" on the woofer and too much braking and the woofer will not be able to move enough to get some body in the bass. A speaker and amplifier need to be matched with regard to damping and then magic occurs....I also use Bryston amplifiers and they match well with my speakers and their damping is over a hundred, and the bass is great. Numbers don't tell all the story....The biggest mistake is thinking that the higher the number, the better the control of the bass....not necessarily....jallen

Inductor in-series with the woofer has resistance approx. 0.08 ohm limiting DF to 100.

Truthfuly, I have not heard a quality sound produced by an amplifier whose damping factor is rated more than 200. Specs don't reveal any secrets how musical and enjoyable an amp will sound, so believe your ears. Digital amps seem to be the exception which normally have a damping factor of up to 1000.

High damping factors are often achieved through the use of large amounts of global negative feedback, which has negative sonic consequences that aren't obvious from the distortion specs (which themselves are virtually useless for evaluating sound quality because they correlate very poorly with subjective perception).

I have designed speakers to work well with amplifiers having a damping factor of about 1, and I'm certainly not the only manufacturer to do so. What sort of damping factor is appropriate for your speakers depends mainly on the impedance curve (primarily the shape of the curve itself, rather than the rated "nominal impedance"). Speakers with a smooth, fairly even impedance curve above the bass impedance peaks can work well with a much wider range of damping factors than speakers with roller-coaster impedance curves.

Duke

dealer/manufacturer

Al, isn't damping simply the instant ratio of speaker impedance and the impedance of the amp to the back EMF generated by the speaker? The amp, best case is a dead short (not possible in fact) to this back emf. Take a bare woofer driver and short out the connections with a short piece of wire and 'thump' the cone. Totally damped? yep. Remove the jumper and try again. Rings, if not quite 'like a bell' than you can certainly hear the resonance.

I work in the semiconductor fabrication industry. One of our BRAG number is what we call RDON....Resistance Device ON.....when it is conducting. Lower is 'mo betta and although a known parameter, is constantly measured and efforts made to improve it in new devices. There are of course physical limits when dealing with Silicon devices.

As an aside, Sunfire /Carver used our (company I work for) devices in the output sections of many of his amps / receivers.