Wylie Williams wrote:

"Stewart Pinkerton" wrote

It has been proven beyond reasonable doubt on many,
many occasions that all nominally competent amps sound the same.

This is an assertion seen often on RAHE. It sounds reasonable to me,
but not so straightforward and simple as it sounds. I would like to satisfy
my mind on my system's amp with as small an expenditure as possible. Last
year, thinking it would be nice to learn the criteria for selecting an
amp,
I started a thread on RAHE asking how to identify "Nominally Competent"
amps. One would assume that on such a basic subject as this there would be
a set of objective measurements that established nominal competence,

One would be wrong, then. "Nominally competent" means competent to drive a
particular load--in the case of audio, the ability to drive a particular set
of speakers in a particular room at a particular loudness level without
producing audible distortion.

Now, if we know all those things (speakers, room, loudness), presumably some
engineer could give you a good idea of how big an amp you'd need. But
"nominally competent" is not some abstract standard that amps either meet or
don't meet in all cases. A 20-watt amp might be quite competent driving a
little ported speaker and quite incompetent pushing a big, sealed subwoofer.

and
many RAHE members responded with suggestions re the appropriate specs. The
suggestions had some commonality, but were different enough to leave
considerable doubt. There were posts saying that there were such specs but
they were not available to the public. One of the best replies named brand
and models numbers and gave descriptions of the differences in sound
between
many highly respected amps, which led me to wonder, if they sounded
different, if any were NC.

If they all sounded different, no more than one was NC! Odds are the only
reason they all "sounded" different was because they all looked different.

One professional posted that he knew the
appropriate criteria but they were, like almost all his esoteric knowledge,
proprietary. (shades of Top Gun - "I could tell you but I'd have to kill
you")

Are you sure he wasn't just telling you that the information you want can't
be found on spec sheets?

It would appear that it is not as simple as I hoped to determine
whether an amplifier qualifies as nominally competent. So while I
appreciate the idea that all these "NC" amps sound the same, we all seem to
be on our own in finding which amps qualify.

Available (objective) evidence suggests that most modern solid state amps
are.

Even if someone were willing
and able to conducts tests he would have to have one reference amp that was
known to be NC. Then he would enter the dark realm of test methodology.
That prospect is daunting enough to make one want to buy an audiophile
magazine and check out the flavor of the month.

The information you want can't be found there, either.

Look, the task isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. Plug it
in, and see if it works. By which I mean, take the amp home, insert it in
your system, put on a big orchestral recording, crank the volume up as high
as you'll ever want to crank it, and ask yourself, "Does this sound OK?" If
it does, the amp's competent.

bob

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