The XPA power amp will light up your home theater!
(Credit: Emotiva Audio)Today's receivers are jam-packed with features, but the one thing they lack is power.
In fact, most $500 receivers never come close to delivering their rated power into all channels.
Some can barely manage a third of their claimed wattage. Right now, your 100 watt per channel receiver might be pumping out only 30 something watts.
People ask me about this stuff all the time--"Steve, Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony and Yamaha receivers all boast up to the nanosecond surround processing modes, connectivity options up the whazoo, and fancy shamncy remotes--so what exactly would a brawny multichannel amplifier get me?" My answer to these queries is always the same: "Just two things, the power and the glory."
The problem: Receivers, even big ticket, $2,000+ models can't spare enough internal real estate to house humongous transformers and hefty power supply capacitors--the compromises inevitably start there. Separate power amplifiers have room for all of that good stuff.
Enter Emotiva Audio's XPA 200 watt, five-channel amplifier ($799), 1,000 watts total. It's actually a lot more powerful than just double your average 100 watt per channel receiver; the XPA amplifier can deliver up to 350 watts to each of its five channels with four-ohm speaker loads. You'll look far and wide to find a receiver that can drive low-impedance speakers like a separate power amp can. And it'll cost a whole lot more than the Emotiva XPA will.
Oh, and please don't worry that the XPA is too powerful for your speakers. Too much power doesn't harm speakers, playing them too loud with an underpowered receiver is far more likely to do your speakers in.
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Dynaudio C-1 speaker with a 6.7-inch woofer and 1.1-inch tweeter
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)Listen, if you're buying speakers, the best thing to do is listen to them. If you can't, you'll learn a lot perusing specifications.
Online shoppers need the most info, but even brick-and-mortar buyers can predict quite a lot about a prospective speaker's performance and system compatibility by looking at the numbers. Tech talk gets you woozy? No problem, the main points of interest would be the dimensions of the speaker and how much the thing weighs.
Hint: bigger and heavier speakers almost always sound better than small, lightweight ones.
So far, so good, but woofer size also provides clues about how much bass a speaker will produce. Bigger woofers make more bass than smaller ones, but the cabinet's size is almost as important a factor as woofer size in determining bass quality/quantity. Multiple woofers may look impressive, but they're less reliable predictors of bass oomph; we've tested lots of skinny speakers with two, three, four, or more drivers that didn't make much bass. The cabinets were too damned small, four 3-inch woofers don't make as much bass as one 6-inch woofer in a larger box.
You might hope the frequency response specification, "38 Hertz -- 22,000 Hertz," would predict how much bass the speaker would make. The first part of that spec, "38 Hertz" refers to the bass output--the lower the number--the deeper the bass. Ah, but since there wasn't any reference to the tolerance of the spec, it's just about useless. Some manufacturers include a "+/-" after the frequency response number, something like 38 Hertz - 22,000 Hertz +/- 3 dB, and that helps a bit. Any speaker that reaches 50 Hz or lower can be considered "full range" and doesn't necessarily need to be partnered with a subwoofer--for music. Multichannel (5.1, 6.1, 7.1) home Theater applications almost always require subwoofers.
I have less to say about tweeters, other than to recommend buying speakers with tweeters; a fair number of pricey "sound bar" speakers are tweeterless. That's not to say they will sound bad, just not as detailed and clear as speakers with decent tweeters.
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Vacuum tubes are hot!
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)It's like the difference in taste between a tomato you grew in your backyard or one of those plastic things at the supermarket, or frozen pizza vs. a slice fresh out of the oven in Little Italy. We're talking big differences here. And those are the sort of sensual pleasures high-end audio delivers compared to iPods and ear buds. Sure, the little buggers sound good enough, but if you really love music, don't you want to hear your tunes sound as good as they can?
I'm sitting here listening to the late British singer/songwriter Nick Drake, and his lines "Do you feel like a remnant of something that's passed?/Do you find things are moving a little too fast?" put the consumer electronics' current ball of confusion in perspective. If you've had enough of the never ending parade of formats: cassette, LP, CD, DVD-Audio, SACD, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, DTS-ES, DTS 96/24, DTS Master Audio, Blu-ray, DVD, HD DVD, HDMI, HDMI, 1.1, HDMI 1.2, HDMI 1.3, HDMI 1.3a, and now HDMI 1.3b, you might be ready to drop out.
This little Darling 1626 amplifier that came to me from George Lenz of TubesUSA is the perfect antidote to that malaise. The amp is an all-vacuum tube design (no transistors) and hooked up to my Zu Audio Druid Mk IV speakers the sound is spectacularly beautiful. There, I said it, the "B" word, which is after all, why musicians seek out old Martin guitars and Steinway pianos. It's why some folks go for early analog Moog synthesizers. It's the sound baby!
The Darling 1626 in all its glory.
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)It's the same deal with vacuum tube audio amplifiers, they somehow coax more natural sound from recordings than solid state or digital amplifiers do. The tone feels richer, warmer, sweeter, more like the way instruments sound in real life. My recordings take on a dimensional solidity, and vocals sound distinctly more flesh and blood human. Tubes also look really cool; sure, they have their followers here in the land of Coca Cola, but European and Asian audiophiles are even more devout believers.
The Darling 1626 amplifier goes for $2,500, but this amplifier wasn't born in a factory; Lenz only builds one when he has a buyer. He imports all sorts of tubes and not only tests each one, he actually takes the time to listen to them as well! He also sells exotic Japanese amps, like the Kurashima 2A3 integrated amplifier ($4,995) that pumps out four (4) watts per channel, double the juice of the Darling, but since my Zu speakers are extremely efficient, they can sing with a couple of watts. These handmade amplifiers aren't cheap, but the pleasures of living with handcrafted designs are a big part of their appeal. The people like Lenz who build these things do it for the love of it, and that's a rare commodity in the twenty first century. The TubesUSA Web site is loaded with great info, especially for the hard-core DIY (do it yourself) audiophile crowd.
Amplifier power is measured in watts, as in "100 watts per channel," but what does that really mean? Do all 100 watt per channel receivers deliver 100 watts? And what about those "1000 watt" home theater in a box systems? Are they more powerful than 2,000 A/V receivers? And what about high-end 100 watt per channel high-end power amps? Are all watts created equal? I don't think so!
Pass Labs 200 watt XA200 amplifier weighs 175 pounds
(Credit: Pass Labs)Unfortunately power ratings are a near meaningless way to compare the loudness potential of one receiver, amplifier, or HTIB against another. That's what power gets you--the more power you put into a given speaker--the louder it will play. More watts aren't necessarily better sounding watts; some hard-core audiophiles get off listening to ultra low power, 7 watt per channel, hand-built, vacuum tube amplifiers. These guys think the purity of the watts is where it's at.
Sure, most of us want more, not less power, but the catch is there's no reliable way for a consumer to learn about a given amp, receiver, or HTIB's wattage. Oh, there's one specification that has served me well over the years: weight. Power is heavy, or to be more precise, the stuff that makes power is heavy. I'm sorry, but a 9 pound HTIB amplifier has about as much chance of putting out 1000 watts as I do. I pretty much guarantee that a 44 pound receiver will clobber a 22 pounder when it comes to dishing out King Kong's room shaking antics. Look under the hood of a high-end amp or pricey A/V receiver and you see a humongous power transformer. Powerful amps need big transformers to pull a lot of power from the wall outlet, and high current transformers are always heavy things. The other power supply related parts are also big, heavy, and, well, not cheap. Fact is, most $500 A/V receivers never come close to delivering their spec-ed power into their seven channels. Some can barely manage a third of their claimed wattage.
The reasons the manufacturers "get away" with this outright fraud are numerous, but the reality is most buyers don't listen all that loud. If you do and/or live a big house or apartment, or have speakers that demand oodles of juice, pony up and buy a serious receiver or better yet, a separates based system with a surround processor and heavyweight power amp. One hundred watts per channel might not be enough, or 200 might be better, but an honest-to-God 300 watts might be what it takes to rock your world. Even if it's just the occasional party where you really want to blast the system, you need to buy enough power. When in doubt, go for more, and don't worry about damaging your speakers with too much power. Fact is, more speakers get fried by underpowered amps than by uber power amps. In other words, you're more likely to "blow up" a speaker with a 25 watt amp than a 250 watter.
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