In what order of VALUE do you place these items

[Butuz]

OK an analogy of how i see it. It may not be 100% accurate but i think it proves my point a bit.

What makes more of a difference to how fast you can go round a corner in a car?

1 Engine (cd player)
2 Gearbox (amp)
3 Tyres (speakers)

Here i would say that, the tyres are most important as if you useless tyres you will still slide off the road no matter how big your engine or how many gears you got. Secondly then, the Engine is important as if you have a pathetially small engine, you will never have enough power to power you through the corner fast enough to make your gearbox or tyres become limiting factors. Thirdly and least important is the gearbox as all it does is transfer the power from the engine to the tyres and if either the tyres or engine are lacking it can't do its job properly.

Thats a crap analogy - but what the hell

Butuz

[5lab]

i disagree strongly on 'The difference between a £200 and a £1000 amp will mostly be in the power it can put out (say 200 watts instead of 40)' - there are plenty of powerful cheap amps out there (marantz do bucketloads of them) and also plenty of expensive not-so-well-powered-ones - cant think of a particular brand off the top of my head cos im not into expensive stuff, but there are lots around..

[Butuz]

There are some amps that cost £2000 and put out 25 watts per channel and there are some amps that cost £270 and put out 90 watts per channel. But generally, more money means more power - i am talking in the general sense here, i am not authoritativeley stating that more money means more power, just that generally more money means more power.

"The difference between a £200 and a £1000 amp will mostly be in the power it can put out" I said mostly not only. Therefore i stand by my statement.

Butuz

[Rave]

I voted speakers-source-amp, but I could easily have swapped amp and source- in fact some of my sources (LP12 when it worked, tape deck) cost more than my amp, the others (CD and Bush MTT1) cost less. Anyway, since we're talking about High-Fidelity equiptment here, our main aim should be accurate reproduction of the original source. Now, a good amp that's not being driven beyond its limits can easily manage a THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) figure of .01% or better. The distortion induced by speakers can easily be 2-3% or more- so, it's not hard to see where your money should be spent. It'll be a while before I can afford any new hi-fi kit probably, but when I can finally afford an upgrade, I'll get new speakers first, quite possibly some home built ones.

Ignore the RMS figures on your speakers its just a rough and semi meaningless way for the manufacturers to let uninformed people know what sorta amp they need

Actually it's their theoretical power handling. Still pretty meaningless though, you'd blow most speakers in short order if you hooked them up to a Krell amp and pumped their 'maximum power' through them- if you didn't deafen yourself first.

(Impedence also makes a big difference here but as 90% of speakers are 8 ohms impedance i wont go into that further).

I will though, because it's important.

90db/w/m (this is around average for low to mid priced speakers) is considered a reasonably easy load thus you wouldnt need more than about 40w per channel to drive them to their max.

90dB/w/m is actually extremely efficient; if you see this on a pair of cheap (small) speakers it's either because the manufacturer is lying, or the speakers have pathetic frequency response. 85-87 would be an accurate figure for most low-mid range speakers.

85db/w/m is considered a hard load and you would want to be putting at least 100w per channel in order to get to any sort of reasonable volume levels.

Naw, 100W (if you can actually find and afford an amp that can genuinley provide it) would still be very loud. They'd be putting out 105dB+ at that sort of power. The classic 'BBC monitor' speakers as built by Rogers and KEF(?) actually have an efficiency of 83dB but they can still attain a perfectly reasonable listening volume, albeit they're not disco floorshakers.

some speakers are as efficient as 100db/w/m an in these cases anywhere between 3 and 9 watts will shake pictures off the wall.

Only horns would be that efficient though.

Now, there's more to evaluating how 'hard' a load a speaker is than its efficiency and nominal impedance. You also have to look at it's impedance curve. The impedance of the speaker varies according to the frequency of the input signal. B&W's high end £8k studio monitor speakers have a nominal impedance of 4ohm but at some frequencies they drop as low as 2ohms. Coupled with 83dB sensitivity, that makes them a viciously hard load, and you need a monster amp to get the best out of them- still, anyone who can afford £8k speakers can also afford a Krell or something similar to go with it. Conversely, my friend's home built set of floorstanders are probably a similar physical size to the B&Ws, but since they use a very different design to them have sensitivity of about 90dB and a benign impedance curve. Consequently they sound good (and very loud) even with quite a weedy amp. The tradeoff, of course, is that their prequency response is probably nothing like as good as the B&Ws.

Anyway, the point is that you really need to match the amp to the speakers for best results. If the speakers have a difficult impedance curve, you need an amp with plenty of current capability; if they're an easy load get one with a lighter touch, or a higher peak voltage capability if you still want big volume.

The difference between a £200 and a £1000 amp will mostly be in the power it can put out (say 200 watts instead of 40), The difference in sound is no where near as much as the difference in power. That is why the amp doesnt make such a big difference as the cd and speakers IMHO.

Well, in fact the amp can have a bigger effect than you think. In fact, most 'Hi-Fi' £1000 amps probably still only claim 50-60W, not much more than an average £200 one. What they will have, though, is a super beefy power supply with big transformer and capacitors, which will allow them to deliver that 60W into loads that would make the cheaper amp quail in its boots. They also (of course) use better switches, potentiometers etc, although they almost certainly make a much smaller difference. Finally, there are different ways of building an amplifier; you have to trade off signal accuracy for power. Most amps, even expensive ones use a class B or AB arrangement, which causes 'crossover distortion'; because they use one transistor to supply the positive voltage, and another for the negative, there is a non-linearity when the signal changes polarity. Class A amplifiers OTOH strongly bias the transistor and thus allow it to provide all of the signal; that means though that they're inefficient and can't provide a lot of power. Musical Fidelity's top of the line amp from a few years ago (the A1 IIRC) was a class A design with a power output of 50W or less, despite costing about £2k. It was physically huge though, and even needed an external power supply. Its replacement was a class AB and provided about 200W. I once went to a police auction to bid for an A1, hoping that nobody there would realise what it was worth, but when I arrived it had already been and gone.

Rich :¬)

[Sk!mD4Rk]

Im going with source, amp, speakers.

A good source will extract the most detail from the audio, while even average speakers will sound pretty good with better sources.

Amplification and speaker matching is even more critical, relating to room size, textures, shape...

People are often blinded by the size, bass, or brand of speaker rather than subjective listening and tend to spend the most on speakers with humourous results.

Garbage in, garbage out.