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Re: On a different note: Response to Morricab on Amplifiers

Posted by theaudiohobby (A) on February 13, 2007 at 16:15:15

In Reply to: Re: On a different note: Response to Morricab on Amplifiers posted by morricab on February 13, 2007 at 02:59:04:

You seem to have your wires crossed with the basics and such makes me wonder why hold such a bigoted view of amplification.

"Well for starters crossover distortion is an Anharmonic type of distortion that is mostly non-existent in Class A and totally non-existent in single ended amplifiers."

This statements is wrong way round, a Class A circuit by definition cannot have crossover distortion and since a single-ended amplifier is necessarily Class A, the phrase "mostly non-existent" is effectively meaningless.

Moving on, a Class AB circuits are symmetric not asymmetric, the article you cited simply notes that asymmetric signals are capable of exposing more distortion than a symmetric signal. Crossover distortion is easily suppressed by correctly biasing the circuit, with good circuit design, crossover distortion can be suppressed to vanishingly low levels, i.e. levels at which it is barely measureable.

"Again, to whom? The oscilloscope or the listener. Linearity for the sake of linearity is NOT the goal. Audible distortion should be minimized not ALL distortion, the elimination of which is impossible with inherently non-linear amplification devices. "

What do you expect me to say to this comment? At any rate, it is an irrelevant here and a non-sequiter in the context of this thread. I started out by saying that zero feedback single-ended amplifiers are inherently less linear as they suffer from more distortion products and at higher level than P-P circuits with feedback, you raised the issue of crossover distortion in Class AB, however that is easily addressed with good design. So as it stands, I do not see that you have added anything to the discussion so far that undermines my original comments.

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