AudioBanter.com - View Single Post

wrote:

nousaine write; You know it's funny buut I don't know anyone who has
actively investigated
even
this situation. What I mean it seem to me that the most common "sound" of
amplifiers driven into overload may not be the "clipping" but the action
of
overload protection circuitry or the behavior of loudspeakers driven into
excess distortion.

That may be the case, Tom. But the whole point of the thread was not really
what causes the sound differences, because we all hear them, just that when
operating linearly thay all sound the same.

Paul Vina

Sure but I'm wondering who has actually investigated cause, effect and exactly
what it is that "sounds" different a little more precisely.

I always 'turn it down' when I hear some kind of distortion that seems related
to overload such as woofer bottoming, tinsel lead snap the odor of voice coil
glue softening up and the like.

But some types of distortion have specific characteristics such as the kind
that Klipple calls "suspension" distortion which is a hardening of upper bass
which can be isolated and related to cause (suspension pulling tight, in that
case.)

As far as I know no one has specifically investigated this with amplifiers and
assigned specific types and causal mechanisms. I'm think that some of the
"sound" assigned to amplifiers may actually be related to loudspeaker
distortion, electronic overload protection mechansims and such which make not
be simple clipping of the signal.

The reason I bring this up now is that a few years ago Floyd Toole told me of
an experiment conducted at the Canadian NRC where they tapped a clipped signal
off the speaker terminals being driven a shard as the amplifier could go and
then played that back in an acoustically separated room on a different system
so they could "hear" the clipping more sensitively. His comment was the 6-dB of
clipping didn't sound "all that bad".

Si I'm just wondering who else may have examined the phenomenon more
specifically and whether they had useful information to add.