What It All Means

My September ‘94 article on amps said that all amps sound pretty much the same, except when you overdrive them, and that you might be wisest to buy the cheapest amp that has adequate power. My experience with the R.E. Designs LNPA 150 has made me rethink that.

Here are some pretty expensive power amps, meticulously designed and constructed (Dan says that the parts cost for these amps is around $1,300, which actually makes them excellent values for the price). They are very conservatively rated, and really aimed at the audiophile market.

But that rated power output is a little misleading. With a very low output impedance and a really massive power supply per channel, the amps will supply really impressive short-term power with no distress, well beyond the limits of my normal amp, with no trouble. At the same time, they are very carefully protected, so that you would have to be a serious cheesehead to damage them.

$2700 is a lot to lay out for a power amp. But, when you get to that happy point in your professional success curve where you no longer have to scrimp quite so much, where you can begin to push the quality envelope a little and indulge yourself a little, well, amps like these might be a really good item to consider to help jack up the basic quality of your monitor path.

One of the signatures of really linear playback components is that as you crank the level up, the sound never seems to get really loud, just fuller. You don’t get that pain cue that comes with the onset of non-linearity (the beginning of distortion – what I think of as “hardness”), and that effect is both really pretty impressive and quite comforting in studio work. The R.E. Designs LNPA 150 monoblock amplifiers have this quality in spades. Thanks, Dan!

R.E. Designs
43 Maple Ave.
Swampscott, MA 01907
917-592-7862

Dave Moulton is trying to stay below clipping, but his power supply is a little marginal these days.

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