In article , Rob
wrote:
Bruce Lankford wrote:
"adie" wrote in message
...
Does anyone have any experience of these amps?


About fifteen years ago, there was a shop near my house which sold NVA
and quite a lot of them. I heard a couple the amps with different
speakers and they sounded quite good to me. The little amp (perhaps
an AP20?) could not drive the ProAcs which I was using at the time
but the bigger amp was well beyond my budget. A work colleague of mine
bought the AP20, won't part with it.



In what way was it unable to drive the Proacs?

I have this (perceived) issue with Dynaudio speakers, and I've only ever
found two amplifiers that sound good - a huge valve amp (sold) and an
old Cambridge power amp (broke under the strain).

You could perhaps give you own answer to your your own question here. :-)

However, I've asked on this NG and been advised that any competently
designed amplifier of the past 20 years should sound identical. Not
unanimous, majority.

My understanding is slightly different.

That where the designer knows what they are doing, and designs the amp to
simply amplify with no audible levels of distortion, departures from flat
response, etc, and the amp is used within its output limits, etc, then
no-one has actually shown that they can hear any difference between such
amps in appropriate use/comparisons. Indeed, various controlled tests
generally show the listeners were unable to distinguish one from another in
such cases.

This is quite distinct from an amp designed with a non-flat response, a
very high output impedance, etc. Or from cases where one amp does not have
sufficient power, or limits in some other way.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html