Amp damping factor?

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.

Magfan,

Yes, that all sounds right. As you imply by referring to instantaneous ratio, the damping effect is frequency dependent (since speaker impedance varies with frequency). By convention, though, the numerical value specified for the damping factor of an amplifier is its output impedance divided into 8 ohms.

Putting the RDON of the output devices within a feedback loop will lower the effective output impedance, with consequent side-effects as Duke and I noted. By producing output devices with lower RDON, the amount of feedback which may otherwise be needed is reduced.

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

Good point! Which brings to mind that the dc resistance of the woofer voice-coil itself will also (probably even more significantly) limit the damping which can be achieved, and make extremely high amplifier damping factors meaningless. Since the path of the current which flows as a result of back emf has the amplifier output impedance, the speaker cable, the crossover inductor, and the woofer voice-coil in series, resistance anywhere in that path will affect that current similarly.

Regards,
-- Al

"Digital amps seem to be the exception which normally have a damping factor of up to 1000".

My Icepower amp has DF=4000 at low frequencies. It is inherent in class D amps since speaker is always shorted by Mosfets to power and GND (to very low source impedance). Mosfets have fraction of an ohm resistance while even small gain before feedback (I suspect around 100) will lower it a lot. Conventional class AB SS amp has gain before feedback of many thousands (lowers THD and IMD but increases TIM). Class A SS amps are better, with gain before feedback of only few hundred.

As Al mentioned, deep feedback brings negative effects (but improves spects). I wouldn't buy class AB SS amp that has very good spects (something has to give) or at least it wouldn't be my first choice to audit.

Here is the link: http://www.stereophile.com/reference/70/index.html to an article about feedback. Stereophile tests Cary amp with adjustable feedback and the sound is the best when feedback is set to the lowest.

Most speakers do not need a great deal of 'damping' to achieve their design goals. A high damping factor is another way of saying 'low output impedance'.

However there are two schools of thought about what is meant by low output impedance! One school has it that you have to use a lot of loop feedback to achieve it. This is the path taken by most transistor amplifier manufacturers. Not all do though and they are noteworthy has having made some of the finest transistor amplifiers available: Nelson Pass, Ayre and Ridley Audio are the names that come to mind.

However, funny thing- there are a good number of tube amplifiers that IMO/IME play bass better than the transistor amps with high 'damping factor'. These amps do so with 'damping factors' between 2 and 20. Tubes are inherently lower distortion than transistors and so need far less feedback to make the resulting amplifier circuit linear- in fact a good number of tube amps do this with no feedback at all. As Kijanki points out, feedback has very audible detrimental effects.

Our ears use the 5th, 7th and 9th harmonics as a means of determining loudness. We are more sensitive to these harmonics than just about **anything else** in audio! So if these harmonics are emphasized by distortion at all- we will hear it. Audiophiles use the terms dry, hard, harsh, brittle, clinical, chalky, white and the like to describe very slight enhancement of these harmonics.

While loop feedback will reduce overall distortion (when listening to sine waves, the jury is out on whether this is true of a constantly changing waveform), these harmonics in particular are actually **enhanced** by loop feedback. The result is that lots of feedback in an amp will result in an amplifier that will never sound natural.

for more information see
http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html