I’m still struggling with the Outlaw purchase over the Parasound. I can’t go anywhere to hear either amp with the Logans. The outlaws are a phenomenal deal but I feel like I’m leaving accuracy/fidelity on the table not stretching my budget to the Parasound.
Would it cause you to feel better if you knew the Outlaw 2200 is made in the same Tiawan facility that makes Parasound amps?
Because they are!
You have a mistaken understanding if you think different power amps will change the sound character! Amps made by reputable manufacturers (and Outlaw has been around for many many years now) do not embellish the sound - you wouldn't want that anyway. You want to hear what the musicians and recording engineer intended you to hear. If an amp adds to that or subtracts from it, that would be a form of distortion. Amp design is largely a mature endeavor and all of the established companies make competent amps that cleanly and accurately amplify the signal as it is input into the amp.
The Motion 60XT are good sounding speakers which is great because they are really what determines the sound you hear. Speaker design is about as old as amp design, but the difficulty of using transducers to accurately transition from an electric signal into sound waves is extreme! If you talk to any speaker designer, they will quickly explain that it is all about deciding on the best compromises to make to get the best sound. They know that their product does indeed have an audibly unique sound signature and that is just a fact of speaker design (at least through this decade).
All you really need to be concerned about with the amp is that it is capable of properly driving your speakers (and the 2200 are fully capable with the Motions) because you can hear an amp that is struggling to perform beyond its design capability!
Just to further clarify this point, I know I am prone to believe, if I have a $20,000 bank of big monoblocks with big meters sitting in front of me that they have better sound than a less "fancy" system. However, I have tried it and if I am blindfolded and don't know which is which, I will hear no difference.
A good sales guy can get you
emotionally worked up (excited) with statements like "You're not going to believe it when you hear this amp! It's going to blow you away! Not even close! Sheer ecstasy!" so that you are anticipating it so much, that you are certain it sounds better. Just like the exact same food will taste so much better after a good hike where you are hungry than it does if you are really not very hungry (or, I guess a better analogy is having the chef give you a loving description of a dish before you taste it - the anticipation influences your perception of the taste!).
The best way to do a comparison of amps is to be able to level match and switch instantly between them under double-blind conditions. That is a difficult thing to manage, but where it has been done between competently designed amps that are not being overloaded, the end result was the subjects could not consistently (reliably) distinguish between the different amps.
All of that said, I do appreciate the efforts of designers like Nelson Pass, but I see it as a matter of elegant design, not change in sound quality. One of his designs may last longer and have less distortion, but the less expensive models do not have detectable distortion, so you are not paying for Sound Quality with all of the extra cost!
