Funny thing is Robert, being an electronics wizard only gives part of the picture. You'd also need some pretty specific anatomy skills too.Originally Posted by Robert
I vaguely recall posting about this here before so apologies if I'm repeating myself, but I'll try to keep it simple.
As our four stringed friends know all too well, the lower the frequency you want to amplify, the more power you need. This applies bass, guitars, home stereo, anything like that. Most people are happy to just accept that as fact (and it is) but the reason behind it has to do with our ears, not electronics.
Our ears are not linear, not by a long way.
If you wan't to prove it, swap an audio taper pot used as volume in something, anything really, and replace it with a linear one. Now sweep the volume through it's range whilst you have some kind of audio signal and you'll very obviously notice that all the volume control seems to be "bunched up" at one end of the control.
How can that be if we use a linear control though?
Simple, our ears, as I mention, are not linear in their response. Not linear in terms of perceived volume; it takes exponentially more and more sound pressure to result in a seemingly linear increase in volume (part of the reason 100W heads are only a little louder than 50W heads, not double. In fact, in terms of perceived loudness, a 100W amp is actually double a 10W amp) and not linear across the Audio Frequency (AF) range from 20Hz to 20KHz.
This last fact is what really causes this whole "more power for bass frequencies" scenario.
If you want loads of technical info, go have a read HERE about Equal Loudness Contours.
The guts of it is that our ears are not so good with low frequency (and if you are my age or older, high frequencies).You need to throw far more sound pressure at them to hear bass guitar frequencies at the same perceived level as guitar frequencies.
So all that proves what we all already know, more power = better bass. Whilst we love to use words like "bottom end" and "thump" and "grunt" and so on, ALL of that is just ways of saying "lower frequencies".
To bring it all back to the specific topic, a 100W amp, with it's ability to generate more sound pressure, will sound "phatter, bassier, ballsier, thicker" because our ears translate that extra low frequency pressure into volume.
I could now dive into the electronic theory as well, but I'm guessing eyes are already glazing over........
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