Hey Gena!
Very cool post! I'm mostly ignorant about such things but have a few questions (mostly to prove that I didn't just skim your post!!!):
--I assume the fluke connects between the amps' outputs and the speakers themselves? Does the resistance/Ohm rating figure into this as to what a speaker actually draws?
--How fast does the Fluke respond to peaks? I'm curious about those very fast, very short transients.
--Did you re-meter the Floyd music tests with the RatShack SPL meter or base the peak levels on the previous sine-wave readings?
--In another post, you alluded that adding an external amp to a receiver would double the possibility of distortion (I'm paraphrasing). Why would that be the case? The signal is still going through one preamp (the receiver's) and one final amp stage (auxiliary amp).
I don't know enough to agree/disagree on this topic. Mostly, I have a tendency to agree that there wouldn't be a difference in well-designed, reasonably-powered amps. I'm 90% committed to that.
But......
For years, I did own a NAD 2200PE, which (according to the marketing) was designed as a 100 WPC amp in continuous mode but with high power (if I remember correctly, 400 watts for short-term of 10 seconds or so) and enormous capability for short peaks and transients in the area of 1200 watts. Maybe I succumbed to the marketing, but I would swear that a good, dynamic recording such as a Billy Cobham drum solo just sounded much more "real", which I wholly attributed to the reproduction of the transients. Of course, that was 15-20 years ago, and I sold them to buy a cheap Technics surround receiver (because I didn't spend any time listening to music anymore) and wanted multi-channel capability for my video collection. So maybe I just remember the whole thing as going from "separates to a Circuit City special" and was so biased as to not really hear the differences….
God, I DO miss that "Pride of Ownership" of those three NAD separates though. Much as I like my Denon 3805, it's really not the same!
