A question for the analog Gurus

Thread Starter

Shagas

Joined May 13, 2013
804
Greetings!

There is a thing that has been bugging my mind for quite a while now so i'll elaborate on it and hope that you guys won't get bored while reading through it.


I'm quite in to sound and my workbench/station is equipped with a pair of Active Studio monitor speakers which are apparently supposed to produce high quality 'unbiased' sound and flat frequency response, which they do .

I've recently unscrewed the back of my M-Audio BX5's to take a curious look on the insides and the amplifier circuit.
I've been playing around with electronics for about half a year now so i'm still a newbie... but upon examination of the main pcb I expected to see power BJT amps fueling the sound but instead what I found is some wierd many-legged IC attached to the main heatsink . After looking it the datasheets I discovered that It was an integrated audio amplifier which left me scratching my head.


Anyway getting to the point , my question is : From the perspective of sound quality ,frequency response , accuracy, distortion % , fidelity etc... will an integrated (Monolythic ? ) power-amplifier IC perform better than the classic 'Passive speakers and an amplifier ' which was designed with multiple stages , all kinds of stabilisation circuits and all that jazz, 'made by hand' ..if that makes any sense . For example:

ampy.jpg
(just found some random amplifier picture on google)

I Don't have the equipment/knowledge to test signal fidelity percentages or distortion percentages myself and I can't type this post into google and expect a processed answer (maybe in 15 years from now ) so i'm asking you guys if anyone here has any experience with building a high quality audio power amplifier


Also, when a company designs an audio amplifier for some application for example a Stereo set or whatever do they design it themselves or is there a 'Best amplifier circuit schematic' available somewhere that everyone knows about and uses to build amplifiers ? A schematic where the components and values are arranged in a 'perfect' that cannot be improved in any way that we know of to get better results .

*****

The monitors that I use are
M-audio BX5
and
Behringer Truth B1031A
 
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