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HT/1510 Jumps up to 1,000 Watts
Hunter Takes You Through ALL the Steps to Improve on the Original
The below text is a transcription of the video.
Hey there, John Hunter with REL here. So, I don’t know why, but we’ve gotten questions about why did we increase the power of the, what was it, 1508 on the new 1510 to a thousand watts up from 800. So if you know much about amplifier power, it’s a logarithmic scale. It’s not linear. So when you hear that something is 200 watts more powerful, don’t think that it’s automatically 25% louder than the outgoing model. It’s nothing like that. So why did we do it? A, we could. You just should. If you can make a car a thousand horsepower and it had a 800, why not? But beyond that, it gives several things. And the real story to why this new model performs so much better in place, so much louder. We measure internally a 4 dB increase in maximum output, which is a lot. That’s an entire category beyond what we were doing before, is because it really is about our ability as human beings to get the most out of our input filters and our limiter filters. The limiters, not filters, but the limiters at the end of our chain are conceived of very differently. Normally, a limiter is sort of the occasion of last resort. It’s the burst strips that, you know, your car runs over, that deflate your tires as you’re going into a runoff area to keep you from going crazy. We look at them a little differently. We actually model ours more on the theory of a bungee cord. What a bungee cord allows you to do properly tested, and we did all the testing for you, is it allows you to jump off, for example, a very high bridge and have the sensation of dropping all the way down, knowing that at the last moment as the shock cord takes it up, you progressively decelerate and you never get your feet wet, so to speak.
Same thing happens with ours, and it’s a very subtle circuit, and it’s a circuit that really requires the human touch to get in there and really delicately dial in the last little bits. So when moving to the higher output of the amplifier, it gave us a chance, Justin and I, a chance to go back in. This is a circuit we’ve been working with for almost 10 years now, and we just keep learning more and more about it. And this one, we are able to get to begin decelerating well beyond 900 watts. It’s a different way of loading the limiter, whereas the old 800 watt one which had a somewhat more, less developed ultimate limiter, we have three stages to our limiter. And the final one is really an important one. And we were dealing with an amplifier that was very new to us.
We had just developed it. We didn’t know what its capacities were. Of course, we test benched it and all that, and it was really big and burst proof, but you just don’t know how it’s going to react. So that one, we began having to decelerate at 650 watts. That last 150 was sort of the safety margin and it probably never got well beyond 750. Now we’ve got a thousand watt and that next level of peeling the onion back of understanding the things that our circuits can and can’t do. So we now have a piece that goes full out till over 900 watts and then more rapidly, but still progressively decelerates. It gets all of about 980, 985 watts before it simply won’t produce anymore. So you’re getting almost everything the thousand watt amp can do versus the 650 watts that we were forced to do. A little more conservative on the old 1508. So it’s a great questions. Probably not the answer you expected, which was just, oh man, you know, a thousand watts is so much more than 800. It’s more, but really, the untold story behind it all is what Justin and I are able to get out of our limiters, which are just crazy good and sophisticated, and it lets us get all the way out to the very limits. So the difference between 980 watts and 750 is really what you’re hearing.