The krell ksa 250 amplifier draws 12 amps from the wall outlet, and it isn’t even close to 250 watts of class A.
Roughly 1,400VA, even if continuous well within the capability of a Power Plant.
How much peak current can the p20 muster?
At 120V, it should be about 30A.
Considerably more than your wall is capable of but I don’t remember the exact number.
Can you tell what’s the reason you often seem to use 2-3 P20 in demo setups, if it’s not just for showing equipment for no special reason?
If the capability of a powerplant’s caps is bigger than the supply capability of the house power supply as well as the caps of large mono amps (and faster than both of them), I wonder that a P20 doesn’t have the size of a refrigerator…but I’m sure I’m missing some simple EE basics (meant seriously).
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I know one set of mono amps it wouldn’t be able to keep up with at full power, the Dan D’Agostino relentless epic 1600’s.
320 volts peak to peak, 113 volts rms, 400 amps peak, 6400 watts into 2ohms, max power consumption of 10kw. You need at least a 220 volt supply to get those numbers out of it though.
When you give a PowerPlant a load to churn, it is out of the PowerPlant’s reserves, however large they might be. I’m obviously stating something as obvious as obvious can ever be, but yeah. If it’s supplying quite a bit of power (current) to one component and it should now simultaneously start providing high transient power (current) for another, as I understand it they both will suffer in tandem if the total current requirement is over the (is it?) 70 amps? The plugged in components won’t compete of the current (as I understand it), they just get to take what they can out of what’s available. Right? How common is such a required amperage to exceed 70A, dunno. (Actually my Electrocompaniet amp has a peak current of over 80A… and it’s not even a big amp. What if I plugged two of those into a P20, no, the wattage would remain in very safe limits, but what if they both wanted to peak at 80A at the same moment? Oh sorry, it’s the caps. Disregard everything.
As I understand it, Power Plants also do not have absolute cross-contamination protection between the outlets. Maybe you wouldn’t want to have digital and analog devices plugged into the same Power Plant for purist reasons.
I don’t really know. I’m just rambling.
What I DO know is that a Power Plant will be better driven by a preceding Power Plant. That’s very expensive and makes a lot of sense in a very expensive way.
I have a power distribution which provides such cross-contamination protection…one could set a P20 ahead of it and use only one outlet to keep the advantage. To use a powerplant as a power distributor, too, might have disadvantages against those features a few distribution systems offer.
I can’t answer all other assumptions. I still try to understand how a cascaded cap storaging/de-/recharging of energy works in case of repeated strong peak draws and what’s their capacity demand.
Why would a powerplant be worse than an outlet when multiple devices are connected. The powerplant can still provide more instantaneous current than that outlet. Running two amps that require 80A off of one outlet doesn’t make a lot of sense. I doubt that anyone builds an amp that draws 80A from the wall. It seems possible for an amp to output 80A for short times even into 2 ohms. I can say that driving two of my amps which can output 85A each (for short periods of time) off of one P20 is noticeably better than plugging those amps into separate 20A circuits (each wired with 10 gauge wire.)
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Yeah, that was a brain error.
From everything written in this thread and really, everywhere else, about modern PowerPlants, it seems like they essentially have no flaws other than absolute cross-contamination protection. I’ve always liked to think of them as nearly perfect products which I’d like to own, asking this SET guy about them just made me question it for a while.
I will strive to be going the flea-power SET route myself, so wouldn’t a P3 suffice? Well now, would a P3 possibly constrict the dynamics? I guess not?
Then again it’s the power consumption that’s to be considered when choosing a PowerPlant, right?
For example an AN Paladin outputs about 2W but its max consumption is 270VA. (!)
There’s hardly room for other components - and the AN Paladin isn’t that uncommon in its power consumption when it comes to low-power SET amps.
Does the performance of a PowerPlant “degrade” any when it’s pushed near the maximum recommended constant power output, prolonged? If it’s supplying its max constant output all the time, will the peaks suffer, etc? Any issues running it like that?
I’d always recommend (if possible) getting something electrical rated to up to twice what is actually needed.
That’s less than 2.25 amps at 120V, hardly a high load compared to the 2kVA for each of my amps. The Stellar PowerPlant 3 (PS Audio’s smallest modern PowerPlant) does 300VA continuous and 1000VA for 30 seconds.
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No but in terms of power, considering a P3. It’s necessarily not recommendable to even solely drive a flea-power amplifier with it, as I understand it. (I don’t know the technicalities when it comes to why we’d need, say, twice the rating, but I believe it. Someone care to elaborate?)
Please review the posts above. The requirements of an SET are modest.
Modest, for sure. This was just about the P3 - it’s rated for 300VA continuous and a SET amp can easily have a power consumption of that caliber. If I had a P3 and let’s say a SET amp with 270VA power consumption, would I dare to also plug my DAC into it?
No, the SET can draw 270VA for very short periods of time. The P3 can provide 1000VA for much longer periods of time. A SET isn’t only 1% efficient, it has much more modest power requirements than the P3 was designed for. SET amps aren’t some new fangled state of the art technology that people don’t quite understand yet. They are well understood and PowerPlants are designed to handle them (and a lot more.)
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How refreshing to hear from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
Thanks Ted.
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There are a few set amps that the p3 probably wouldn’t have enough juice for, such as the NAT New Magma using GM100 tubes, but those are few and far between, I would think you would need a P20 for that type of set amp.