At the end of 2020, the Federal Trade Commission proposed eliminating what had come to be known as the "Amplifier Rule," which had been in effect since 1974. Then-FTC commissioner Christine S. Wilson wrote, "Freeing businesses from unnecessarily prescriptive requirements benefits consumers."
To me, that made no sense. Far from imposing "unnecessarily prescriptive requirements" on amplifier manufacturers, the Amplifier Rule had long forced manufacturers to clean up their acts.
As I
wrote in an article published on the
Stereophile website in 2021, in the hi-fi boom that began in the 1960s, the Institute of High Fidelity became alarmed by amplifier manufacturers exaggerating their products' output power. Such mystical numbers as "Peak Power" and "Music Power" were used willy-nilly to produce sales-oriented ratings with little to do with reality.
