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Looks like you are on the Voltage Paradigm

Which is neither a good or bad thing.

The reason I use 'paradigm' is such exists as a body of thought, outside of which everything else appears incorrect or even blasphemous.

FWIW I did not create the Power Paradigm- it existed before I was born. Google 'Fisher A-55 amplifier' and look at the first hit, which is a YouTube image. The setting at 12 noon on the control is 'Constant Power', at fully CCW it is 'Constant Voltage'. At fully CW the control is marked 'constant current' but that never developed as a common method of driving loudspeakers.

Amplifiers on the voltage paradigm tend to have very low output impedances, those on the power paradigm tend to have output impedances in the range of or just below that of the loudspeaker impedance, constant current amplifiers tend to have output impedances that are some multiple of the impedance of the load.

This all has to do with how the speaker is damped; in the old days there was not a set formula for that; so matching speakers and amps was done differently. That is why older speakers (EV, Altec, JBL and other horns) usually have midrange and treble controls. They are not there to adjust the speaker to the room, they are there to adjust the speaker to accommodate the voltage response of the amp.

(Loudspeakers that operate with open baffle designs are best driven by amps that provide little or no damping and might require only 1:10 as a damping factor in the amp)

EV and MacIntosh led the way to create the idea of making the amplifier into a voltage source; in this way speaker response would be predictable with greater plug and play. This worked quite well with box speakers (although the Acoustic Research AR-1, the world's first acoustic suspension loudspeaker, was designed for an amplifier with a 7-ohm output impedance and was an example of a Power Paradigm device), although not so well with horns, ESLs and planar loudspeakers whose impedance curve does not derive from the resonance of a driver in a box.

However the voltage paradigm pretty well took over in the 1960s and 70s, with transistor amps being more common and with which it was easier to create a constant voltage response. Along with it our methodology of measurement changed- as in output impedance here, also we see the spec of speaker Sensitivity as opposed to Efficiency (which are the same thing only when the speaker is 8 ohms).

FWIW no loudspeaker needs a damping factor of over 20:1 and most are best damped with something less. A link to the article written by the head engineer of EV is below.



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