California Audio Labs Amplifier—Part Two (addition from previous letter)
Dear Gary: My point [with the previous letter] was that Mr. Hardesty should had compare the CAL amplifier to another 500 watts amplifier; everything equal. For example, how the Proceed HPA 3 sounds when compared with another 250 watts amplifier, like a 250 watts Krell amp. When I discuss these issues between my friends we always say, “This guy is comparing apples and oranges, take for example a Chevy V6. Will it perform better than a Ford V8? The answer will be that the Ford V8 will probably be more powerful, so why compare it? I understand that The CAL is twice as powerful and sounds twice as powerful, but if it lacks the quality that a good amplifier should have, like a three-dimensional depth of field, or double the power rating in 4 ohms, then the power means nothing. If the point was that the CAL is twice as powerful, then I stand corrected. But if the point was that a 500 watts amplifier is better than a 250 watts amplifier just because of the power, then I disagree. When everything is said and done, let me ask Mr. Hardesty: Is the CAL Audio Labs amplifier better overall than the Proceed HPA 3? Please just a simple answer of YES or NO will do. No matter what the answer will be, thanks to all of you for bringing so much information to all of us
Manny Santelices, Miami, Florida
Audio Equipment Review Editor Richard Hardesty Comments:
In each amplifier review I try to describe the technical aspects of the design being tested and give our readers a subjective opinion about what I hear when I listen to it. I compare the sound of all amplifiers to the sound of all others because that’s what we do with amplifiers in the real world —listen to them. Sound quality and power are completely unrelated unless the amplifier is driven to clipping. Many small, high-quality amplifiers sound much better than poorer quality alternatives with higher power ratings. Yes, a good 100 watt amplifier can sound lots better than a poor 500 watt amplifier. If your tastes and system requirements demand higher power, then that aspect of the design becomes more important to you and that’s why we discuss power as well as sound quality. A power rating in watts doesn't tell the whole story about real amplifier power as I described in earlier articles in the multichannel amplifier series. I use a 150 watts per channel Mark Levinson 33H mono amps to drive the front left and right speakers in my reference system. I use a 250 watts per channel Proceed HPA3 to drive the center and surround speakers. (If you think the Proceed sounds better than the 33Hs because it has a higher power rating, you're very, very wrong.) Because the Proceed is a fixture in my reference system, and because I had just completed a review of the Theta Dreadnaught which was still here, I compared some of the sonic qualities of these amplifiers to the CAL in the review of that amp. These three products are similarly priced multichannel amplifiers, hardly “apples and oranges” as you put it. The CAL amplifier is a 1000 watts per channel, five-channel amplifier. You can’t get 5000 watts out of a wall socket, so this amplifier is throttled down to 500 watts per channel, which is about the limit of what can be obtained from a 20 amp circuit breaker. Would it deliver more power into a 4 ohm load? Not with input power of 115 volts and 20 amps it won’t. The amplifier is perfectly capable of doubling output into lower impedances but if it were allowed to try, the circuit breaker would open and your movie experience would be interrupted. You can’t get more power out of an amplifier than you put in. The Proceed HPA3 is a 250 watts per channel, three-channel amplifier. It can deliver 500 watts to each of three channels into 4 ohms because you can get 1500 watts from the wall socket. The Proceed is an outstanding amplifier, but it’s not as powerful as the CAL. It images a little better in my opinion, and I said so in the CAL review. In fact, I described my impressions of all aspects of the sound of each amplifier in the respective reviews. I also described the design approach of each product. That’s all I can do, and you’ll have to take it from there. Wouldn’t it be great if a reviewer could say unequivocally (and accurately) that one amplifier outperforms another overall? Then you wouldn’t have to think for yourself at all. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and you wouldn’t want it to be. If we all had the same speakers, and we all listened to the same things in the same-sized rooms; and we all had the same tastes and the same budgets, then our requirements for an amplifier, or any other audio component for that matter, would be the same. What a boring world that would be. There would only be one model of everything, and we’d all own it, and there would be no need for equipment reviews. We are not all the same, and our needs and tastes differ. Fortunately, there are amplifier designers with different ideas about what constitutes the perfect amplifier, and there are a wide variety of products available to suit almost any buyer. You can get the opinions of many reviewers about what sounds best or “performs best” (whatever that means to you) but learning how things work and how they will suit your personal needs should be your goal. The job of a design engineer is to balance compromise. Every design is compromised because nature won’t allow it to be any other way. The designer chooses to concentrate on the aspects of performance that he feels are most important. The job of a reviewer is to describe to the reader what path the designer of the product has taken so that the reader can determine whether the product is suitable for his or her individual tastes and requirements. Power output, sound quality and price are just three conflicting aspects of amplifier design. There are dozens more. Keep reading; and as you learn more about how things work, you’ll see that complicated components like audio amplifiers need complicated evaluation for comparison. A few simple numbers won’t tell you all you need to know.
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