Thanks Alan! Just as well there isn’t a lot of music energy at 20khz as my partly damaged, old ears won’t be responding anyway! + the Maggie’s have some resistors in reducing the treble. I’m sure Magnepan are being a bit liberal with their 87db at 1 Watt at 1 metre and isn’t there a little voltage cheat about what 1 watt into 4 ohm is? My Nuprime has enough power, at 5/10, to get the Maggie’s to peak around 85db at 2.5m which is a good volume for me. I’m thinking an expensive DAC with an analogue volume control and your 501s might a big improvement or I might already be in diminishing return territory and better off sticking with the Newprime?
Andrewwrote:
Thanks Alan! Just as well there isn’t a lot of music energy at 20khz as my partly damaged, old ears won’t be responding anyway! + the Maggie’s have some resistors in reducing the treble. I’m sure Magnepan are being a bit liberal with their 87db at 1 Watt at 1 metre and isn’t there a little voltage cheat about what 1 watt into 4 ohm is? My Nuprime has enough power, at 5/10, to get the Maggie’s to peak around 85db at 2.5m which is a good volume for me. I’m thinking an expensive DAC with an analogue volume control and your 501s might a big improvement or I might already be in diminishing return territory and better off sticking with the Newprime?
Yes, not a cheat per se but there is confusion over efficiency and sensitvity. These are different things.
Sensitivity is the relevant piece of information. It is how loud the speaker plays for a given input voltage. This is normally taken as 2.83 volts rms. So speaker impedance which varies across the frequency range is not relevant.
When applied to a 8 ohm resistive load this represents 1 watt of power, but in a speaker it could be anything.
Efficiency is how much power the speaker converts into sound. This is usually tested at 1watt. However no speaker is actually 8 ohms across its frequency range. It's a bit meaningless TBH and of little use as a metric.
Another thing to be aware of is that no speaker has a flat frequency response. So if you use a sine wave at a specific frequency you can game the results by choosing a frequency that corresponds with the highest level.
So you need to test across a range of frequencies,say 500Hz to 2kHz with a white noise signal and rms it to give a more representative value.
The P501 is possibly overkill for the Maggie's, but would sound great. The P421 or P422 would possibly be more appropriate. They are much better technically than the Nuprime, so will sound better and drive the Maggie's better.
If you look at the nuprimes spec it's power output doesn't increase from 8 to 4 ohms which implies an inadequate power supply. It's thd + n figures show its much higher noise and distortion than the P421/p422/p501.
In terms of DACs use something like a Topping D90se driving the amps directly. It's performance is state of the art, but you could use the nuprime pre out to feed the P422. That would make a lot of sense as I suspect the dac section of the nuprime is relatively much better than its power amp section.
Any more you can share about this? Presumably its class D, but maybe its passive and serves primarily as extra inputs and volume control for your existing amps? Will it be remote controlled? 12v trigger? :):):)
deigmwrote:
Any more you can share about this? Presumably its class D, but maybe its passive and serves primarily as extra inputs and volume control for your existing amps? Will it be remote controlled? 12v trigger? :):):)
Class D is only appropriate for power amplifiers, so no the Upcoming Pre1 pre amp is based on some of the highest performing OP amps available. It is fully a fully differential (balanced) configuration.
Hi Alan - I have a pair of your P501 mono blocks - I have following this thread regarding your planned preamp - I am keen to purchase one - is there a confirmed release date on this as yet?
Class D is only appropriate for power amplifiers, so no the Upcoming Pre1 pre amp is based on some of the highest performing OP amps available. It is fully a fully differential (balanced) configuration.
