Amp question

[Stone B]

How important is the type or quality of amp you use with passive monitors, does it affect the quality of your sound?

[knightfly]

Everything in your studio, including the furniture and you, affects the sound. Amps, in particular, should add no "sound" to the sound. To do that, they should be more powerful than you'll ever need so they don't clip on transients/overloads, which not only sounds bad but can destroy tweeters by overheating the voice coil due to sustained DC levels and the resulting high current. An amp should be essentially a "straight wire with gain", meaning what goes in, comes out (only bigger)... Steve

[Stone B]

What voltage is normal?

[knightfly]

There are too many places to measure voltages, both AC and DC, peak or RMS, input, output, power supply, etc - Can you be more specific?

[Stone B]

I'm not really knowlegeable about all this stuff, I'm learning as I go. I have two amps, they both say 120 volts on the back of them, I'm not sure exactly what that means. I don't want to endanger any equipment I use with the amp or endanger myself. I'm pretty sure one of these amps is ancient enough, I wanted to know if there is a standard out there I should know about.

This became a concern when my brother started up a project and pulled out his Tannoy Reveals. I'm shopping for monitors now, but if he takes his amp back and the old one won't cut it, I may need to buy a new one, or some powered monitors.

[knightfly]

120 volts would either be the AC power (from the wall plug) or one set of un-fucking-believably LOUD speakers, or maybe just tiny bits of black paper in front of some burned out boxes... Butt serially, since you don't know how much of a smart-ass I am, it's the first answer. Unless you get gear from other than the USA, that will be the voltage it runs on. Some other gear may use a "wall wart" that converts that 120 Volts down to 9 or 12 or 18 volts, but not a power amp.

If you can swing it, powered monitors are the way to go. Decent ones will have internal amplifiers well-matched to the speakers, so that's one less variable to worry about... Steve

[Stone B]

Exactly the advice I needed