Amplifiers

Sorry to put it this way, but that is a bit of a macho question, and it has been around for as long as I have been talking about hifi. In fact, wattage is completely unimportant for the reproduction of good music. It is not comparable to the power of a car. You can have a 200 watt amplifier that is so badly built that the sound is sharp and shrill — what good is that to you? Then you are better off with a 10 watt amplifier that sounds beautiful and harmonious. So where does that discussion come from? From the old tube amplifiers, the valve amplifiers, where wattage was not so easy to produce. A seven watt valve amplifier was already an enormous amount back then, and 25 watts was completely unthinkable. Hence that historical story of how many watts is my amplifier, how many watts is my loudspeaker. With modern hifi that question is actually superfluous. For those who want it a little more mathematical: we talk about decibels, and a decibel is twenty times the logarithm of the amplification. When an ordinary person simply speaks, that has a power of roughly 0.001 watts. Someone speaking louder is around 0.01 watts, and someone really shouting perhaps 0.1 watts — I have never actually measured it. On building sites, machines reach 70, 80, 90 decibels, and there people put on hearing protection to reduce the sound; converted, that is thousands of watts. You never need anything like that in an ordinary living room. There, a solid ten or twenty watts is enough. What is true, though: an amplifier that can produce 200 watts has a much heavier power supply and can therefore reproduce much faster transients — those transitions that go from soft to loud very quickly. That makes the sound fresher, in the hope, of course, that it is also amplified harmoniously. Historically, by the way, you see that with most amplifiers of the past fifty years the volume knob never even gets to halfway: it sits at a quarter to twelve, ten to twelve, and by then it is already loud. So the advice: go and listen at a good dealer and ask for a good amplifier, if need be one that produces fewer watts but sounds very harmonious.