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RE: There's more than one way to do that...

Our MA-1 power supply can produce about 50Amps using the same measure that many solid state amplifier manufacturers use.

The issue here is finesse. If you want to create realism, the last thing you want to do is burden the amp in such a way that it makes more distortion because when it does so, its the kind that is audible.

I think you said it yourself- you have enough power so that there is plenty of power for realism. But you might consider what it is that causes realism in the first place. One thing certainly is a lack of distortion (and by this I am making it clear that I don't like presentations that exhibit a large amount of the 2nd order; while they certainly sound sweet, its hard to regard such as neutral).

But in addition to that power, the distortion components that the ear finds as the most audible (IM, and the higher ordered harmonics) will have to be kept to a minimum. That's hard to do when you have a lower impedance. In a solid state amplifier, the output devices have a non-linear capacitive aspect built into the junctions. This capacitance is magnified by current (BTW, the FM radio in your car is tuned by a device called a varactor diode that takes advantage of this principle). If you want to avoid the non-linear capacitive effects on the circuit, its to your advantage to keep the load impedance higher.

Now you can see this sensitivity to load in the specs of any amplifier, even class D.

Another reason 4 ohms is a hard way to go is the speaker cables. Now I am old enough to remember how I was able to go to Ace hardware and get zip cable, and it worked. But back in those days a lot of speakers were higher impedance. If you have a 4 ohm load the cable is just going to be a lot more critical plain and simple. As such it will induce a coloration, so you inherently have to keep it short. This again is easy to demonstrate. RCA published a nomograph showing just how important the speaker cables were back in the 1960s. Essentially, the lower the speaker load impedance, the more the cable works to reduce the damping factor. At 16 ohms its almost a non-issue.


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