But they were relegated primarily to powering subwoofers and car stereos because they weren’t sonically competitive with analog amps. Smaller, lighter and far more energy efficient digital class D switching amplifiers have been available for audio applications for almost fifteen years.
To dissipate all this heat these power amplifiers also need large heat sinks, which take up space and add weight. Class A/B amplifiers are only slightly better since they operate as class A amps until certain point when they slide into more efficient class B operation where only 50% of consumed energy becomes heat. Over 75% of the energy that goes in goes out as heat, not sound. That’s because Class A amplifiers generate tremendous amounts of heat during operation. If you wanted a top-echelon audio power amplifier fifteen years ago, it would be big, heavy, power sucking, and hot. Welcome to my world.) The ne plus ultra of the high-C tradition, the opera that sealed Pavarotti’s American fame as “King of the High C’s” in 1972, is Donizetti’s “The Daughter of the Regiment,” which Javier Camarena has recently made his own at the Met, overturning decades of company tradition by actually giving encores (most recently last month).Expensive not as dimensional as a tube amplifier (You can also, on YouTube, find more than one video comparing different tenors’ renditions of this same note, over and over this is what opera-lovers do for fun. To get an idea of the contrast, listen to Pavarotti’s gorgeous falsetto high F in “I Puritani” (toward the end of the ensemble “Credeasi misera”) and compare it to the full-voiced take of someone like Nicolai Gedda, also far from shabby, in the same piece. Nonetheless, the note caught on and Duprez’s style displaced an established bel canto tradition, to the point that we expect full-voiced high notes.
In the heyday of bel canto, tenors tackled most notes above a B as falsettos, like a crooner when the tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez first tried a full-voiced high C, in Rossini’s “William Tell” in 1831, Rossini compared the sound to the squawk of a capon being strangled. As for the high C: The kind of C you hear today is a relatively recent development.
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