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Saw and interesting demo...

WHere they showed a typical over compressed pop recording played at a moderate volume. The resulting power consumption was around 2 watts and hardly moving at all (thanks compression!). Next they put on a well recorded opera that had an explosion of some kind. THe PEAK power was around 2000 watts!!! However; when watching the power needle through most of the performance the power was well below 1 watt and often around 1/10th of a watt. We also tried a good recording of Mahler 3rd symphony. This one hit well over 500 watts on some big drum hits but most of the time hovered between 0.1 and 10 watts.

The point the demo thought it was making is that you need an extremely high powered amp to cope with huge dynamic demands. However; as they showed most music doesn't have much contrast in dynamics so actually not much power is needed. Also, the average power on the acoustic recording was very low, usually 1 watt or less and the peak that hit 2000 watts lasted maybe a few milliseconds at most.

The point this really makes, at least to me is this: At the peak of extreme dynamic recordings nearly EVERY amp, SS or tube will clip. Likewise, for dynamic range restricted recordings (nearly all pop) the amp is likely NEVER clipping...even modest power on lower sensitivity speakers will play pop clean at plenty loud levels (over 90db).

The question then becomes HOW does the amp clip. If the amp clips on the peak but then as soon as the peak has passed goes on its merry way as if nothing ever happened then there is a very high probability that you will never even hear the clipping. If, on the other hand, the amp feeds that clipped signal back into the input thus inducing further clipping and distortion or worse, the amp oscillates, then the sound of clipping can be painfully obvious. Most high power amps , when they clip do so very abruptly and in a hard way. They tend to recover quite slowly from this clipping.

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