Frequently Asked Questions
What is the real power of Goldmund amplifiers ?
The Goldmund fans have always been asking for the “real power” of their Goldmund amplifiers, confused by the various standard and the various published figures. In fact, most of existing norms are totally useless to represent the “real” power of an audio amplifier in its real usage. Music been made of transients, essentially, Goldmund has always been measuring an amp by its capacity to deliver a short transient. We called it the “Power before clipping at 8 Ohms”, but it was too imprecise.
Finally, the Goldmund research team decided to create a norm that anybody could use with a simple equipment and which could be considered reasonably representative of the amp capability. Here is a brief description of our measurement technique :
- The amp is loaded by 8 Ohms, 4 Ohms or 2 Ohms pure resistors, high wattage.
- The signal sent is a burst of one sinus period, 10kHz with a repetition factor of 100Hz (we use an HP 33120A generator)
- The signal amplitude is raised until distortion climbs to 0.1%
- The Power is then the measure made on the resistor with an oscilloscope (we use a Tektronix TDS2024)
- The AC voltage reference is set to 117/234V and controlled during the measure.
This is it. Now you know what we do when we tell you that the Mimesis 29.4 is capable of 610W/8Ohms before clipping on transient.
