Roger Thorpe wrote:
Don Pearce wrote:

Huh? You can play any am,p quietly; you just turn the volume down. It
is the loud bit that separates the men from the boys.

d

Well, you might worry about things like noise, crossover distortion for
class B and inaccuracies in channel balance at low volumes for a macho amp.
Maybe the ability to play quietly separates the ummmm... nightingales
from seagulls?
There must be a better analogy somewhere.
Roger tThorpe

The state of the art in amplifiers has reached a stage where these
things should be history, although there are obviously amps where they
aren't. These won't be found at the cheaper end though, but mostly among
the boutique "high end" efforts.

Many low to mid range amps these day will use one of the integrated amp
chips that really perform quite brilliantly. Integrating a power amp
really is a smart thing to do because most of the residual problems with
them stem from temperature gradients between the output devices and the
drive. In a single chip these are essentially eliminated, so the amp is
always performing as it was designed. For the rest of the circuit, in a
chip it costs nothing extra to current mirro the input stage, buffer the
voltage amplifier stage and generally do all the good things that push
up the cost of a discrete amplifier.

d