Power Rating

Figure 4: Tube amp: Actual vs. Perceived power
TC amp designs
When TC Electronic set out to design a bass amp range, we were highly inspired by the tube
designed amps, particularly the sound and response created by the above mentioned ‘tube
compression’.
In order to understand where our amps ended up and how they perform, we need to take a step
and look at the overall power design of our amps first.
RH450 Power design
Using the RH450 as an example of our designs, we first looked at the power supply and power
amp design parts.
Starting out with the PSU section, there are numerous considerations as for life time, peak
reservoir, heat development, choice of technology etc.
In the case of RH450 we choose a switch mode power supply design with a long term power
performance of 250watts, backed by a peak reservoir carefully matched to reach 450 watts under
terms of the crest factors of bass signals as described above
Figure 5 outlines a very simplified example of how a water analogy may be used to explain how
the power source, peak reservoir and general power flow are combined: