Self on Audio, 3rd Edition

Chapter 41Audio power analysis

(Electronics World, December 1999)

Intended title: Power Partition: Part 2

This article extended the idea of power-partition diagrams to include real waveforms of real music, and therefore required rather a lot of tedious measurement to acquire the probability density data. One of the surprises was that very different musical genres had very similar statistics. It was however reassuring to discover that the demands made on an amplifier by a sinewave were greater than those for music, but not wildly out of line. In other words, sinewave testing builds in a safety margin—if it works on sinewaves it will certainly survive music. Sinewave testing has received a lot of unkind criticism over recent years, but it continues ...