Hello, I just joined, primarily for the audiophile products. Looking at purchasing the NHT C3 speakers for our new living room. Space is about 15 feet wide by 33 long and they will fire long ways. Space is just for general listening, music room with all equipment is downstairs, so hoping they will fill it with sound nicely. Cheers.
Mar 18, 2024
The specs say 2 Volts. However, that is not a power specification, it is a voltage spec.
Power is defined as volts x amps. Volts x amps = watts.
Basic ohms law. Without the current spec (amps), there is no way to solve for watts when given volts.
As such, the power output is entirely unknown.
In my experience, when a manufacturer tries to obfuscate and/or capitalize on the ignorance of the general public, there is usually something to hide.
Probably not much power at all coming from this unit, though it would be nice to know for sure.
The full spec sheet is on their website. If anything, you're buying this more for the DAC than the amp.
It is a voltage specification.
According to this little something called Ohm's Law, Power is voltage times current.
Without a current spec in addition to a voltage spec there is no way to know the power output of a device.
To help illustrate the concept, a device with 2VRMS output may have less power output than another device with 1 vrms output.
If the device w 1 V rails can push 4 amps of current, it can output 4W of power. If the device with 2 V supply rails can push 1A of current, its power output limit is 2W and thus it is capable of only half the power output of the amp with the 2V rails.
By giving only a voltage spec, then by definition they were obfuscating the power output rating.
Whether this was intentional and what the reasons were is unknown.
They probably figured many people wouldn't know the difference between voltage and power.
Thanks for unwittingly helping to prove part of my point.
b) nothing unwitting about anything I wrote.
1) I said " Current limiting in amplifier design is not limited to protection against shorts ." I did not say current limiting factors are "not relevant." In fact, I said the opposite. I said (paraphrased) that there were several relevant current limiting factors beyond protection against shorts.
2) "Flat" frequency response is a relative and subjective term, especially if tolerance is not specified; i.e. +/- some number of dB. However, if you look at the peaks and valleys in the frequency response plots of the vast majority of headphones (or speakers, or any other electromechanical audio output transducer for that matter), and you consider that flat, then I postulate you wouldn't know a nice tittie if one motorboated you upside the head. Regardless, frequency response is irrelevant to my point and is not correlated to impedance. And, I would say that speakers and headphones have the widest FR variances of any component in an audio system. I would also say that this doesn't much matter to a large extent and many other factors have a greater impact on perceived fidelity.
3) Again, POWER by definition is voltage times amperage. One does not know the POWER output of an amplifier if only the VOLTAGE is specified. VOLTAGE only tells you the available rails before clipping. It is only part of the story. IMPEDANCE (not frequency response) is the AC approximate equivalent of resistance, and VARIES WITH FREQUENCY. The NOMINAL impedance of a speaker or headphone driver is an AVERAGE across the audible spectrum. At any given frequency, it will vary. Depending on the driver type, the actual impedance at any given frequency may vary significantly from the NOMINAL or average rating given. For example, my Martin Logan electrostatic speakers have a NOMINAL impedance of 8 ohms. But, this varies widely across the spectrum and at the upper frequencies the impedance is as low as 1/2 ohm. This is part of the reason why power testing into a dummy load such as an 8 ohm power resistor does not always translate well to an actual load. It is true that if there were no limiting factors upon current in an amplifier design, then one could derive the output power from the voltage rails and the impedance of the load, at least at a given frequency. But amplifiers often have many design constraints that limit the output current and thus prevent a given voltage from delivering the maximum theoretical amount of current into a given load. These can be power supply limitations, output device limitations, thermal protection, battery management, etc.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to teach an engineering course here, so if you have further questions I suggest enrolling in a basic electronics course at your local community college.