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True power output?

#21
Yeah it's nothing magic they used built-in compression and hi pass filters. It still is a fraud.
Transients are an essential part of bass sound, in such a way that bass amps often have a burst power 3 or 4 times bigger than RMS power.
In some cases like the Marshall Dynabass, the whole amp was built around properly rendering transients. The amp had a peak power 10x as big as RMS.
It is also the reason why 500+ w heads sound better than 100 w. Headroom is life when it comes to bass amps.
 
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#22
I hope reputable amp manufacturers do not follow TC down the slippery slope of wattage deception. All their claims as to why their wattage rating is technicaly valid is deception. Continuous RMS is really the best way to compare apples to apples.

I did not know the FTC ruling had been withdrawn untill I did some checking because of this thread. I repaired a Berringer amp last year and thought it strange that they claimed 90W when clearly it was not. The output IC was capable of >100W, however the power supply would only be capable of about half of their claimed power output. I thought perhaps Berringer had found a loophole in the rules, being an instrument amplifier or some such.
 
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#23
Jazz Ad said:
Yeah it's nothing magic they used built-in compression and hi pass filters. It still is a fraud.
Transients are an essential part of bass sound, in such a way that bass amps often have a burst power 3 or 4 times bigger than RMS power.
In some cases like the Marshall Dynabass, the whole amp was built around properly rendering transients. The amp had a peak power 10x as big as RMS.
It is also the reason why 500+ w heads sound better than 100 w. Headroom is life when it comes to bass amps.
Click to expand...

Why does their solution have to be "magic". According to their paper on Active Power Management, their goal was to mimic the behavior, sound and perceived volume of a tube amplifier in a lightweight solid state amplifier. If compression and hi-pass filters was what they used to mimic that behavior (since that is what tubes do at high volume levels aka "tube compression") what is wrong with that? Also your statement about 500+ watt head sounds better than 100 w that is very subjective and more watts do not always mean better sound. A Ampeg V4B or Fender Bassman 100T sound pretty good to me.

The only issue was their marketing, they had two options, market the true wattage with a big explanation about APM which most people would not bother to read or understand. The average customer would just see the wattage number and choose the amp with the bigger number. The other option which they chose was to advertise the "perceived" wattage which also wasn't a good choice but they were screwed either way. The newer TC Electronic amps do not have the Active Power Management because they wanted to give those amps a more modern solid state sound.
 
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#24
deluxeg said:
Why does their solution have to be "magic". According to their paper on Active Power Management, their goal was to mimic the behavior, sound and perceived volume of a tube amplifier in a lightweight solid state amplifier. If compression and hi-pass filters was what they used to mimic that behavior (since that is what tubes do at high volume levels aka "tube compression") what is wrong with that? Also your statement about 500+ watt head sounds better than 100 w that is very subjective and more watts do not always mean better sound. A Ampeg V4B or Fender Bassman 100T sound pretty good to me.

The only issue was their marketing, they had two options, market the true wattage with a big explanation about APM which most people would not bother to read or understand. The average customer would just see the wattage number and choose the amp with the bigger number. The other option which they chose was to advertise the "perceived" wattage which also wasn't a good choice but they were screwed either way. The newer TC Electronic amps do not have the Active Power Management because they wanted to give those amps a more modern solid state sound.
Click to expand...
Well whether or not they were screwed either way is of no concern to me. If that's how they choose to design an amp, that's fine, but be honest about it. If your idea is sound, people will buy it anyway.
 
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#25
Jazz Ad said:
Yeah it's nothing magic they used built-in compression and hi pass filters. It still is a fraud.
Transients are an essential part of bass sound, in such a way that bass amps often have a burst power 3 or 4 times bigger than RMS power.
In some cases like the Marshall Dynabass, the whole amp was built around properly rendering transients. The amp had a peak power 10x as big as RMS.
It is also the reason why 500+ w heads sound better than 100 w. Headroom is life when it comes to bass amps.
Click to expand...
I don't really agree. I've played plenty of 500 watt heads that don't sound as good as my 180 watt one. Also headroom gets in the way of overdrive.

Still, I agree that it was fraud on their part to say it was about twice as powerful RMS as it really was.

deluxeg said:
Why does their solution have to be "magic". According to their paper on Active Power Management, their goal was to mimic the behavior, sound and perceived volume of a tube amplifier in a lightweight solid state amplifier. If compression and hi-pass filters was what they used to mimic that behavior (since that is what tubes do at high volume levels aka "tube compression") what is wrong with that? Also your statement about 500+ watt head sounds better than 100 w that is very subjective and more watts do not always mean better sound. A Ampeg V4B or Fender Bassman 100T sound pretty good to me.

The only issue was their marketing, they had two options, market the true wattage with a big explanation about APM which most people would not bother to read or understand. The average customer would just see the wattage number and choose the amp with the bigger number. The other option which they chose was to advertise the "perceived" wattage which also wasn't a good choice but they were screwed either way. The newer TC Electronic amps do not have the Active Power Management because they wanted to give those amps a more modern solid state sound.
Click to expand...
That's still no excuse for blatant ********.

There were something like 200 watts between what they claimed their amplifier did and what it actually did. My amp doesn't even put out 200 watts.

JimmyM said:
Well whether or not they were screwed either way is of no concern to me. If that's how they choose to design an amp, that's fine, but be honest about it. If your idea is sound, people will buy it anyway.
Click to expand...
Seriously.

People buy V4s and Fender Bassman 100s, and PF350s, and Walkabouts, and so on. None of those are very high power.
 
#26
deluxeg said:
Why does their solution have to be "magic". According to their paper on Active Power Management, their goal was to mimic the behavior, sound and perceived volume of a tube amplifier in a lightweight solid state amplifier. If compression and hi-pass filters was what they used to mimic that behavior (since that is what tubes do at high volume levels aka "tube compression") what is wrong with that? Also your statement about 500+ watt head sounds better than 100 w that is very subjective and more watts do not always mean better sound. A Ampeg V4B or Fender Bassman 100T sound pretty good to me.

The only issue was their marketing, they had two options, market the true wattage with a big explanation about APM which most people would not bother to read or understand. The average customer would just see the wattage number and choose the amp with the bigger number. The other option which they chose was to advertise the "perceived" wattage which also wasn't a good choice but they were screwed either way. The newer TC Electronic amps do not have the Active Power Management because they wanted to give those amps a more modern solid state sound.
Click to expand...

Nice try...sincerely
 
#28
nashvillebill said:
Hey you know--this car we're selling goes 200 miles per hour.

What? Your independent tests show it only goes 125 miles per hour? So what--it still seems REALLY fast. That's good enough, right? We're still gonna say it goes 200 mph.
Click to expand...

If we are bringing car analogies into it, a better analogy would be, Car A and Car B can both go 200 MPH, Car A has a 4 cylinder turbo and Car B has a V8. Unfortunately Car A was advertised as having a V8 instead of the power of the V8.

Watts alone do not determine how loud an amp is perceived. The human ear is a crazy thing and can be tricked into many things including the average volume perceived. Just look at how digital music compression like MP3's work.

The only thing TC Electronic did wrong was bad marketing, I think their concept and technical solution is pretty cool.
 
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#30
JimmyM said:
And that would be OK with you? Doubt it.
Click to expand...
It depends I guess, for a car analogy some say the Ford Ecoboost V6 is better than the V8 for towing so if I went to the dealer and said give me the best towing truck and I found out it was a V6 I wouldn't be upset. But back to bass amps the two amps I own are an Ampeg SVT-3 Pro which many many people say sounds quieter than its 450 watt rating and I also own the TC RH750 which from reading the earlier threads before the bench test came out I can't recall any complaints about it not being loud enough.
 
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#31
The 3 Pro's alleged underpowering problems are totally from people not knowing that they should ignore the input light and crank the gain pretty hard. It's a 450w amp and independent measuring confirms it. And the RH750 also has a 236w power amp.
 
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#32
The analogy is flawed, IMO. TC goofed, especially their documentation actually specifies 450 watts. That was bad. Too bad they didn't describe what they were trying to accomplish and how they were doing it. In my mind, it's like they specified a higher horsepower than they acutally had to achieve the same 200 MPH. The end result is wanting to play a certain volume ( hit a specific speed in the car analogy ). The HP behind it is what we're arguing about ( mostly ).. and not the end result.

The fact that the RH750 and RH450 only can output a 230 watt RMS sine wave is interesting. There is more going on than compression and magic/hand waving. the 750 IS louder than the 450. Nobody is playing a sine wave through a tone generator to show how loud their bass amp is. The power output secsoin of the TC amps is doing something different.. and the 750 is pushing higher voltages and higher peaks through speakers than the 450 is. It's not all about RMS. If it were. The 750 and 450 would be the same volume... which they are not. Anyone have any reasons why that is the case? It's not "more compression". There is still dynamic range in the output and it's still clean.
 
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#33
TC's new trademark.


thCA1TTC0F.jpg
 
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#34
LOL that's hilarious. It's OK when a 450 watt is measured to output 450 watts on the bench but is a dog in the real world... ( blame the user ). But if an amp with clean headroom and dynamic range ( IMO ) is as loud as needed in the real world, but doesn't measure well on the bench, it's no good. That's rich. I think I'd rather have the louder amp rather than the quieter one.

Although the power transistors may only be 236 watts, the rest of the power and output section probably are configured for high dynamic range and peaks... yes, very transient, but I'm guessing that the peaks match the voltage swings of a bass running through a 450 watt or 750 watt amp. TC isn't just compressing the signal.

I used to have a 40Watt Proton stereo with 6db of clean headroom. It was much louder and cleaner than 250 watt stereos of friends back in college. It could only do 40 watts but the 6db of headroom gave it clean peaks much higher than my friends amplifiers. I don't know, but I'm assuming that TC is doing something similar.

I'm sick of these threads. It's complicated. It's also more complicated than people want to spend the time to understand. TC did not produce the 450/750Watt RMS amp they insinuated and even looks like they specified in their own manual. Shame on them. IT's too bad that what seems, to me, like a clever output section can't be appreciated because people won't get past the RMS rating... or realize that RMS isn't a particularly good measurement of how loud an amp might be. Just look at Jimmy's post. An amp measured to be 450 watts on the bench underperforming.. not being loud enough. Parts of the discussion are black and white, parts are not... people keep latching on and reposting the same measurements and opinions. What a waste of time.. Oh well.
 
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#35
Man, are we back on this again?
I'm sure there are plenty of you here who remember how badly this went last time.
Keep it civil, or I'll stride right in here and issue tickets for participants on -both sides- of anything ugly here.
OK?
Thanks.
 
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#39
Having owned, sold, and reacquired (really cheap, post watt-gate) a TC RH450, as well as getting a "real" amp, the only thing I can offer is anecdotal:

I have had an 810 cab hooked to both my SVT 2 Pro and my RH450 and I can tell you right now the difference in volume did not come down to 64 "tube watts" (300W vs 236W) or 150 "advertised watts" (300W vs 450W).

I was making it rain ceiling tiles with the SVT... and just got a bit of dust with the RH450. My SVP/Crown rig sounds way louder than the RH450 to my ear as well.

But.. I do like the sound/tone of the RH450 and it is great to have a digital DI around. It just taught me not believe wattage ratings and test things for yourself to find what you like. Now I don't buy gear without testing it in person if I can.
 
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