If any of you have ever read the EE “Doc” Smith Lensman series of space opera then you will be aware of the narrative of the irresistible force meeting the immoveable object.

This series of books was incepted in the 1930s and is a must for any aficionado of science fiction. When one takes into account the era his books are conceptually incredible; before the jet engine was invented Smith was talking inertialess drives and directed energy weapons. At the climax of his series the weapons are planets flung at lightspeed into the heart of stars. Sadly one suspects that L Ron Hubbard read his books during the war years …

When I hook up a pair of Rotel 500 watt rms monoblock amplifiers to PMC MB2SE loudspeakers for a demonstration in the downstairs room of the 164 Lygon st showrooms I am reminded of EE Doc Smith’s total subjugation of Newtonian mechanics.

A power amplifiers job is to overcome the reactive impedance load imposed on it by the loudspeaker and compel the drive units to respond as accurately as possible to the musical signal.

If one had the theoretically perfect amplifier as a thought experiment it would be capable of extolling an accurate full bandwidth musical performance from a primitive transducer. This is not a matter of “wattage” per se. Wattage is unfortunately a specification that has been diminished by greedy advertising agencies seeking sales in a technically corrupted consumer marketing environment. That is why wattage specs should always be suffixed with RMS at the very least.

Manufacturers advertising agencies to this day attempt to exploit the hugely variable nature of a musical source signal in order to quote a higher amplifier power. In 1974 the US Federal trade Commission attempted to intervene by imposing the RMS standard on amplifier manufacturers. It was soon subverted with alternative standards and in the real world is almost entirely irrelevant as an indicator of sound quality.

In fact, within the confines of the specialist hi fi and home cinema marketplace, the power rating of a product has become so corrupted that amongst the high research individuals that frequent a store such as Carlton Audio Visual, they will often respond more positively to a product that deliberately underplays its power output.

Thus a surround receiver that proclaims itself as being 50 watts continuous RMS all channels driven means a lot to this group of cognoscenti. And for this spec to be real we are talking carefully made output stages of surround amps in the $5000 plus region. I often point people at the Denon top of the range integrated amplifier the PMAS1 that weighs in at 30kg, originally retailed for $14,000, and is rated at 50 watts …

This being said there is another corrupting factor of power … and that is the simple desire for more. All the negative and positive marketing hype and counter culture arguments aside, you can really feel the difference when the amplifier stakes are raised.

Rotel are one of the arch exponents of this art, and they keep themselves clean by being fanatical about component quality in their products. In their factory every power supply of every amplifier is carefully hand wound on jigs that look like they were rescued from the Mitsubishi Zero factory at the end of the war. They take enormous care over the copper itself and the lamination material and are very aware of the difference in sound that a minor change in materials can make.

There is a clear transition in sound quality as you climb the fish ladder of amplification. It is not the volume. It is the definition of the bass with respect to transient attack depth and octave differentiation, it is particularly the sense of spatial transparency and how the soundstage is decoupled from the loudspeakers. Indeed one of the most satisfying ways of bringing a music performance effectively into a room with real life dynamics preserved is by having massive and genuine reserves of amplifier power available.

There was a time in my twenties and new to Australia when I myself followed the path of upgrade via spec and bought and sold my way through a catalogue of tier one Japanese stereo amplifiers starting with the 70 watt per channel integrated and ending with the 200 watt per channel pre and power top of the range. I was practicing what I preached to my customers in the commission driven sales arena of a store that pretended to be “professionals in quality hi fi”. It was a pity the music quality got worse as the power went up and the THD went down …

The breaking of the chain for me in that organisation happened when a hippy kind of chap wandered in to the business I was managing with a very odd looking amplifier called the Musical Fidelity Synthesis. This had a nominal power of 70 watts and a very high quoted distortion level of 0.1% when the Japanese tier one was quoting 0.005%. However on any subjective audition the Musical Fidelity simply blew away the far more expensive 200 watt pre and power amplifier. It was then I began to realise something was wrong with the qualitative criteria I had been given by the tier one manufacturers …

I confess I still resent the garden path of consumerism enforced on me by that company and its marketing and product falsehoods that I then perpetrated on my customers, and that’s why I will never buy a certain brand of motorcycle either …

The man who represented Musical Fidelity thirty years ago still visits me from time to time. He is a rural Victoria dweller completely uncorrupted by exposure to the Realpolitik of the CE industry and thus can see immediately when an emperor has no clothes. Peter surfaces occasionally to buy a piece of good Hi-fi for a friend and proffer wisdom on things alternative that I doubt we city people even realise are happening. I don’t think he has ever read a product specification.