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Well, then you clearly gave it a fair chance.
What would fall into that category?
I can actually kinda believe this. It takes sack to get on a forum where 100 people are singing praises and voice an (honest) opposing opinion. I've certainly caught much flack for standing up and standing my ground around here.
Perhaps for some it does. It's also easy to pile it on when it becomes convenient.
Okay, I'm going to push back on you again here. I haven't seen anyone giving you flack for standing your ground on the issue, and I think I've been more challenging to you than anyone has. What I have given you flack for is lobbing snide remarks which also seem to belittle folks who love the amp and aren't all worked up over this as you are. That's the part I've taken issue with on this with you and a few others. Back when we had the review thread, there were many more folks who kept asking that you guys give it a rest so that we could talk about the head in the more general purpose it was created, but the grenade lobbing which seemed design purely to stir the hornets nest proceeded for many days/pages regardless, equating us with folks who had accidentally had sex with a transvestite without being bothered, and on and on. Yeah, I get humor, but you and few others had it at the expense of others TB'ers. We even said go somewhere else and discuss it. Of course you did eventually thank goodness, but you made sure to peak back in to remind me at least that I should be thankful for it. Perhaps humor on your part again. I don't know honestly. Hard to infer intent in an internet forum.
I'm not mad at you, and I take you at your word if you say that you weren't trying to just unsettle the natives. No hard feelings on my side at all. I hope you decide what's best for you long term and make the best choice.Jason, you are reading motives into my posts that aren't there. In can be hard in this medium to gauge intent. I'm not faulting you for that, I'm guilty of that from time to time as well. You read something and think, "that SOB!" but it turns out the malice really wasn't there.
I did open the other thread because no one else would. I thought the topic should be taken somewhere else. I waited to see if the mods would do it and it didn't happen, so I made an attempt to make it happen and luckily it worked. I was just joking when I came back into the thread saying how peaceful it was. It made me feel a little good to help the non-angry RH owners out a bit by funneling the vitriol elsewhere since I was part of the problem to start with. And it all seems to be going better now. New thread open, Uffe giving feedback. Seems like things might calm down now.
The flack I was talking about was in other past threads on TB, not this one. Well, if there are people that feel pushed away, I hope they read this and realize it was just a misunderstanding. It's all good, man
First off, I realize that this answer should have come a few weeks back, so I apologize for not being faster to respond.
There are a lot of questions, opinions and comments on these many pages but rather than trying to answer them all, I will try to give you some more background of how we designed the RH450 and also why we believe that 450 watts is indeed the most relevant rating of the amps’ performance.
I think I’ve already established our initial target of designing an amp with great performance and sound for bass playing, while not being too focused on the bench measures. Here is a bit more background on our considerations.
We’ve already talked about our Active Power Management technology and its ability to deliver bass relevant amplification and sound as well as higher energy levels than most other 450 watt amplifiers on the market.
We also talked about how this is achieved through tight power control and, among other effects, lower peaks than a comparable 450 watt transistor amp.
The BGM review confirms both of these findings; lower peaks, but more energy and density than the 500 watt benchmark amp used in the review.
Our original findings in subjective tests and measurements concur with Toms findings as shown below in a comparison between a 500watt transistor amp (left graphs) and RH450 (right graphs) clearly indicating exactly these effects.
Our internal analogy and inspiration for this has always been the performance of classic all-tube amps.
attachment 1
Now, of course, the question here is why our amp only measures 236 watts in BGMs tests and yet we call it a 450 watts amps.
Well, the other half of this design is that actual class D amp and powersupply module inside the amp.
The raw power module inside the RH450 actually is capable of delivering 450watts RMS into a 4 ohm load, at bursts of 20ms with the APM disconnected.
attachment 2
[This Audio Precision (”AP”measurement shows a 1kHz sinus burst (20 ms) that have a peak value of 60V, corresponding to 42.42Vrms  450W RMS in 4 Ohm]
I don’t want to go into a long explanation of measurement setups, but I will underline that the 20ms are closely related to the natural decay of a bass peak signal and the crest factor of bass as discussed in the APM document.
The measurement is of course reproducible, should someone want to take a stab at this.
So, to sum up, we basically had the following dilemma when designing the RH450:
On one hand we had a power module that would be able to supply 450 watts and measure correctly, but with all the downsides of potential hardclipping (as explained in the APM doc), lower average power and density and on the more subjective side; a less bass pleasing and musical sound and response.
On the other hand we had our APM technology achieving great sound and bass performance (at least that’s what our subjective tests said), higher average energy than most comparable (and even a few higher rated amps) with a resulting higher perceived loudness, or ‘power’ if you will, than that of the clean 450 watt transistor performance. Yet, the clear downside, was that APM in a strict bench test would come out with the very odd 236watts result.
So, we debated quite extensively what would be the most relevant rating for the amp; the bench test measure, or the real world performance measure (that corresponds to the actual power module inside).
We chose the measure that we felt made more sense to the bass player and not to the engineer and went with the performance measure that also corresponds to the actual power of the module underneath the APM technology.
Of course, in hindsight, I fully realize that we should have made a bigger fuzz about explaining this to our end-users and regret that we didn’t take on the task to explain this rather complicated matter at an earlier point in time.
I sincerely apologize to those of you have felt that we have let you down in not doing so.
A couple of other clarifications:
Quasi peak watt:
I saw that some of you noticed my comment on facebook using the ‘quasi peak watt’ phrase. Quasi peak is a term that we’ve used internally to relate to the perceived loudness or power. It stems from the Electro Magnetic Compliance world and aims at describing how a noise signal from one apparatus influences another based on how often and how big noise peaks occur.
This somewhat correlates with how our ears respond to the loudness, average levels and peaks.
Still, this simply made the whole thing even more confusing, bad call on my side, sorry.
So what now?
Well, we have definitely learned that we need to explain this whole power scheme in greater detail to ensure that no one feels that we didn’t give them the full story on this unique technology.
Therefore, we will be adding a few articles in the style of the APM doc. To our website underlining how this all relates. You will probably see these come up within a weeks time or so.
What about RH750 and Blacksmith then?
Well, since we are at it let’s not wait for BGM to make another round of measurements, here are the facts:
RH450: Raw power module: 450 watts rms, with APM: 236 watts rms, Spec rating: 450 watts
RH750: Raw power module: 741 watts rms, with APM: 236 watts rms, Spec rating: 750 watts
Blacksmith: Raw power module: 1512 watts rms, with APM: 924 watts rms, Spec rating: 1600 watts
Finally, on a personal note, I have to say that the 450 watts rating of the RH450 IMHO does give you a much better feel for what this amp delivers during playing than the 236watts rms rating.
Of course, this poses a huge question on what measurement(s) really are the most relevant to perform in order to give a bass player a solid indication of how his amp is going to play.
As a bassplayer I wondered for years about the seemingly accepted terms of Tube watts being louder than transistor watts while the term ‘watts are watts’ also seemed to be a set rule. Even more so when I started playing various different bass amp brands and realized that the power rating even between two transistor amps where, by no means, the parameter to compare what I was actually going to get out of an amp in terms of performance when playing my bass.
I hope this sheens some more light on the APM and RH450 case and again, I would like to apologize for both my lack of response and ability to explain this to you at an earlier point.
Uffe
Doubling wattage doesn't get twice as loud, though. It takes 10x the watts to get twice as loud.
