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Damping Factor and Bass Control

pastorbarrett

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Hi folks. Was recently trialling a couple of integrated amps with my ported speakers. Similar enough power output on both into 8 ohms (60 watts and 50 watts respectively), however the 60 watt amp presented bass in a (subjectively) much more appeasing manner - taut, controlled and did not seem to bleed into the mids and so on etc. Furthermore, my own 100 watt Yamaha suffers the same issue in respect of bass presentation.

Looking at the specs, the most notable factor I could see was damping factor - the better controlling amp listed damping factor as greater than 2000. Is this spec attributable to what I'm hearing? Many Thanks.
 

777

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Probably not. The damping factor at the speaker is no more than 50 in real life. Look at the transformers, which is more powerfull, which is bigger, heavier.
 

DonH56

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Possibly but there are many other variables.

Damping Factor = Zload / Zout so an amplifier with higher damping factor has lower output impedance and can "better" drive a speaker. That said a damping factor of 100 is more than enough for most of us; that means less than 1% variance with load.

The things leading to high damping factor include greater number of output devices and higher feedback, Higher feedback typically lowers distortion as well, and there are a myriad of design choices inside the components that can lead to different sound.

So, damping factor may well be a contributor, but probably not the only one (and likely not the root cause).
 
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pastorbarrett

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Thanks. If of interest, the high damping factor amp was from Hegel. Seemingly they do use higher feedback too in their designs. Does Hypex exhibit a similar trait? Or too broad an assumption?
 
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