Question to geeks -- Why do amps have so many parts?

Taowolf51 said:
Here's an internal pic of a Gaincard, and a Gainclone made by Clones Audio; fairly simple.

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That's what I'm talking about.
Small, less parts to break... but I guess it can only put out so many watts. :scratch2:
 
you can make an amp with just one transistor a tip31 springs to mind . it wont sound as good as an amp with many parts though .
 
Exactly.

Building an amp is EASY.

Building a great amp is incredibly difficult, and requires a lot of work and talent, and sometimes serendipity. There are genius amp designers out there that have pulled it off, and some of them have pulled it off with simple designs.

Building a PERFECT amp has yet to be done.

In between the easy amp and the great amp, what you see - and what drives the complexity - is the reality that most of the time when you try and improve on one part of an amp's design/performance, it takes more complicated circuits, which takes more parts... and that changing one part of the amp can impact other parts of the amp, which then also may require more parts. The genius part is in figuring out how to design circuits that work better, and don't require more parts, instead of just adding patch on top of patch. Missing that genius, you get component proliferation 99 times out of 100.

John
 
They're designed so that all of the smoke can't escape at one time. It's less expensive to replace individual small containers of smoke than if you had one large container fail and release all of the smoke at once. :yes:
 
If you want lower component count, look into tube equipment sometime. A single-ended 300B amp is the definition of simplicity, though honestly even a push-pull amp is not all that busy compared to a lot of solid state equipment. Another way to get lower component count is a "chip amp" type design. Stuff with those big STK power modules doesn't have nearly as much on the board, but if you look at the schematic diagram of the power module, you'll realize all the stuff thats missing on the board is inside the black box.
 
Mystery said:
That's what I'm talking about.
Small, less parts to break... but I guess it can only put out so many watts. :scratch2:
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It's true, they don't put out a ton of wattage. These gainclones specifically only put out 25-50 wpc (depending on the version you get), though you can get equivalent monoblocks as well.

I was/am actually quite attracted to Clones Audio's amps, especially considering their simplicity, though I wish they had a bit more exposure. 6Moons did a review of them, and while they love them, I personally don't trust 6Moons much.
 
The first time I cracked open my Threshold S/300 I almost cried. It's simplicity is zen-like.

- Michael
 

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Sweet! My evil plan is working...

All free samples will be accepted for evaluation, of course.

John
 
lanwanman195 said:
They're designed so that all of the smoke can't escape at one time. It's less expensive to replace individual small containers of smoke than if you had one large container fail and release all of the smoke at once. :yes:
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Ref. 'dark sucker theory'

hrballenger said:
'tis said that a perfect amplifier is a straight wire with infinite gain...
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A straight wire with infinite gain would blow up an infinite amount of speakers whilst melting an infinite amount of cryogenic cable. Could get expensive.

tomlinmgt said:
The first time I cracked open my Threshold S/300 I almost cried. It's simplicity is zen-like.

- Michael
Click to expand...

Looking closer methinks it is less simplicity and more along the lines of extremely clever parts layout. That makes me cry.

Mystery said:
I'm not talking about modern receivers that have DD, DTS, HD etc... processing.
Simple stereo amplifier like BB275 or vintage 2-chanel amps have so many parts that it's really weird to look inside.
Can't there be just one transformer, couple of transistors and few capacitors?
Why in the hell they need 1000's and 1000's pieces of resistors, capacitors, transistors and all others thingies to amplify input signal?
Does each part do something that other can't do or smaller number of them can't do what a lot more of them can do?

This is a question, not a comment so thanks for informational replies.

An example below of BB275. It's a 2-channel 75wpc amp but look at the number of resistors, caps and transistors, they are everywhere.
I even see quite a few chips in there.:yikes:
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The parts required to achieve the goals of the design are what the designer uses. As a former designer, including AF and RF amps, I cannot express the pressure to reduce parts count placed on an engineer. It all has to be justified, reviewed, analyzed, re justified, etc., until most designs never see the light of day anyway. Honestly I'm amazed anything ever gets to market.

Best regards,

QEMaster
 
This pictures is from a single ended vacuum tube amp (Psvane T300). Most of them have very simple designs with few parts involved:

530009541_698.jpg
 
The best design has the exact number of parts needed, no more, no less! That's what's called good design.
 
Funny, I was going to post up that example as well. But who knows how that homemade thing actually sounds. It could have been put together by some kid in a basement from plans he got off of the internet.
 
IMO, the SS amps have a lot of parts because designers are forced to put extra components to account for (a) the high currents involved in the Power Supply, and (b) the paralleling of multiple devices in the power section.

Perhaps an illustration would help. If you were to power a SS amp with multiple windings on the power transformers, reduce your gain stages to 2, use high V FET's and then use an output transformer, your amp parts count would drop substantially and it would look more like a tube amp. The catch: high V SS devices can be very noisey (switching noise) and or expensive, and may have trouble matching the linearity of the better tubes. Hence, you end up with higher counts of (cheaper) passive parts like resistors and capacitors which don't add a lot of cost, keep the V rails lower so you don't need an OPT and voila - more parts, but cheaper amp with reasonable sound.

Like everything in life, it is about the tradeoffs. Doing it Nelson Pass' way is cool, but expensive.
 
240sx4u said:
This is a photo of the inside of my classe' CA-2200. I think it's fairly elegant.
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I agree, that is elegant.

I like to see the internals of gear arranged like that, as symmetrical as possible, but not at the expense of specifications.
 
Taowolf51 said:
Here's an internal pic of a Gaincard, and a Gainclone made by Clones Audio; fairly simple.
Click to expand...
That LM3875 chip has no less than 25 components inside, and you would need to double for stereo. IOW, it's an integrated circuit which means they just pack all the components you see in the picture from the OP into an IC (roughly, different circuit design but same basic principle).
Then you need all the other circuitry blhagstrom mentions.
Schematic here:
http://www.hilberink.nl/amps/lm3875schema.htm
blhagstrom said:
:D

It takes that many to make the "magic".

The whole right side is the power supply. It turns AC into DC.
You need a positive DC and negative DC.

The left side is the amp, stereo needs 2 of everything.
To get to 75wpc, it takes a "gang" effort.... etc., etc.,
Click to expand...
Now that's an answer I can live with :thmbsp:
 
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