Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater What to expect from poweramp

As Dakkon mentions, buying a good, reputable power supply now means never having to replace it so long as you take good care of it (usually). Therefore if you're going to go this route, I would personally get the 200 wpc minimum so that later on you don't get the itch to upgrade it. Then once the technology changes you can upgrade your processor, without having to rebuy the power amps that come in standard recievers. Imo power amps don't gét upgraded in standard recievers, so why pay to repurchase those same power supplies everytime you need to upgrade your reciever?

At lower levels you won't find much difference in SQ, that comes (as you suspected) when the volume knob goes up. Don't get the wrong impression when Quack says 'only 3 dbs'... 3 db's is a HUGE difference! Before I bought the XPA-3, my Denon (volume went from -70 up to +12) hit my maximum comfort volume level at about 0. Once I hooked the Emotiva up, it hit that level at around - 18.

One can hardly distinguish between a 1-2 dB swing at any level, and 3dB is slightly noticeable, that has been fact since audio was a subject. The scale of your volume knob tells you nothing, it is SPL that you need to consider.

Your certainly have taken a 360 on your stance on amplification since the pre-purchase/owning period of the odyssey monoblocks and now after you have sold them. Cognitive dissonance?

IMO I would avoid the UMC-1 pre-pro at all costs. It is riddled with problems and glitches and Emotivas history with pre-pros have been a debacle. A much safer and more stable product would be to buy a receiver with current feature sets from Yamaha, Denon, Onkyo, Harman Kardon, Marantz, Pioneer etc that has pre-outs that you can hook up the external amplifier to.

These “should I buy an amp?” questions come up regularly. Almost daily it seams. I tend to ignore them anymore as the pro/con external amp arguments don’t change and the same folks say the same things over and over again. You might want to search this sight to hear all the rhetoric again. I must be bored to respond…

If you’re set on buying an external amp, don’t go cheap. If you’re going to do it, do it right. Pick yourself up a Rotel, Nad, Parasound, Krell, Bryston, Axiom, McIntosh or other than can compete with those. You will definitely tell a difference, but I seriously doubt it will be a marked improvement is sound quality unless you smoke a lot of dope and tend to believe in fairy dust and the tooth fary. An amp simply..well…amplifies whatever data it receives. This isn’t magic and there’s no voodoo or top secret large breasted virgin hand rubbed electron process occurring in the box. It’s just math. What you will hear differently, will be dynamic peaks. An external amp that has any sand will provide slightly clearer sound at higher volumes and times when there’s a lot going on.

We all know you mean a 180.



And Sirquack if it's your opinion that 3 db's is 'barely noticable' then you're welcome to that opinion. My opinion differs from yours however. I know I listened to my M80's played through my Denon for a good 8 months played at 0 on the volume scale. Then the day I hooked them up to the Emotiva and set the volume level to 0 (instinctually) I damn near blew the windows out of the living room and gave the dog a heart attack. There was no need to pull out an SPL meter to tell me that they were playing RIDICULOUSLY LOUD!!! That was plenty obvious already.

Besides my whole point of telling that story was because previous to that experience I had assumed that the levels would be equal until I got to the very top, and then it would go higher... in other words, I really hadn't thought about it much. But when I almost blasted myself clean out of my seat it dawned on me that when the Denon was running things at 0 it was probably feeding my speakers with around 100 watts. But then once I hooked up the Emotiva, at 0 they were probably getting more like 240 watts.

Which brings me to a point I forgot to mention, above 0 on the Denon things started to get a little shakey... it really sounded as if I was pushing the limits of my M80's (perhaps because I was starting to drive them into 'clipping'). However once I fed them their rated power supply, taking the volume knob ALL the way up gave me nothing but smooth (although insanely loud) performance without that element of fearing for their lives.

In short, trying to crank them without enough power made them sound strained, and I always had the impression they were about to break. Cranking them with their rated power supply showed me that they are not 'delicate' speakers at all. The fact of the matter is they are capable of volumes beyond anything you would ever play them at, and still keep their composure when pushed to those levels. There is a reason they refer to them as 'LOUD speakers'!

No; when something goes full circle its 360°

That's correct. But it seems to me the good Dr. is of the opinion that Sirquack has gone in reverse.

I could be wrong...... I'm not, but I could be.

That pretty much sums up the whole issue in one sentence.

What makes it tricky is that the actual voltage/current limits of the amplifier (and how it behaves at the limit) do not correspond exactly to the power rating, which is why you see reports of "good" 100WPC amps sounding better than "cheap" 100WPC amps.

I'm starting to think we should set up some kind of loaner program where we all chip in a bit of money then buy one piece of "no compromises" equipment and ship it around so everyone can put it in their system and see what kind of improvement it makes before spending any serious coin. Once everyone has a chance to try it out the first piece of expensive kit we could sell it off and start trying out something else.

This is pretty common practice on a number of forums dealing with smaller, lighter stuff (eg $300 flashlights), guess we should check out shipping costs on a 70 pound power amp before going any further

You didn't say anything about sending it back after each individuals' test.

So I call first dibs!