Odd term, right?
It doesn't refer to slaying dragons but it does matter a great deal to us Audiophiles.
Slew rate measures how quickly an amplifier can respond to a sudden change in input signal. It's usually expressed in volts per microsecond (V/μs). High slew rate means fast response—critical when reproducing percussive transients, string plucks, or anything with fast rise times.
Let’s say your amp has a slew rate of 3 V/μs. That might be fine for soft classical or spoken word. But if a snare hit comes in with a steep leading edge, the amp may not rise fast enough to track it accurately. The result? Blunted attacks, blurred microdynamics, and a general loss of energy.
This isn’t a matter of bandwidth alone. Two amps might share similar frequency response but behave very differently with complex transients. One sounds alive, the other dull. That’s the difference between speed on paper and speed in time.
When we talk about a system that sounds “snappy” or “tight,” we’re often hearing the result of fast slew rates combined with good damping and low phase shift. Transients aren’t just icing on the cake. They’re how we recognize life in a recording.
Slow gear softens music. Fast gear reveals it.
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