For people who claim that amplifiers are too complex to be characterized by measurements alone, did you ever think hiw they are being designed and characterized by the engineer who designed them. I hope you agree that they are designed by an engineer and not by an audiophile who does not understand engineering or physics. It is complex till you understand. By the way manufacturers are not helping either. Because they perpetuate the myth that their amps are magical and not provide data that they do have. And I think they do that because they know that most perspective buyers do not understand engineering and will not be able to comprehend, a point that is very evident in this forum.
No - engineers don't understand the soul of music. Real high-end gear is designed by designers, who painstakingly try every single component in every single possible configuration, and determine the optimal design based on long listening sessions, using their golden ears to guide their design. That, and reading chicken entrails.
All recorded music has been highly processed, knobs get turned and sliders slid to achieve the subjective sound of the engineers and producers.It's the System, Stupid! .... sorry,
The "ecstasy" is in the recording, and always is there ... the job of the system is to try and faithfully reproduce what was captured, without doing too much damage in areas which are subjectively important. Many system fail this, and badly too - just go to a hifi show, and hear expensive equipment mangle what was captured, left, right and centre - you would think by now people would have sorted this sort of thing out - but no, they haven't ... help!!!
Do we really need all the over the top hifi now there is so much more offered with all the home entertainment? Long gone are the days when all we had was a little TV with a couple of channels and our beloved hifi.
But in spite of that, and sometimes because of that "fiddling", amazing soundscapes have been captured in the recordings ... you wouldn't know it by listening to most systems, because they are incapable of rendering the details within clearly enough. It's a shock when a previously considered "bad" recording comes to life, reveals layers of musical and spatial information that most people would be completely unaware of - the dynamics of recordings are often poorly handled in playback, the audio systems are unable to reproduce the subjective intensity of the recording correctly - and it just sounds flat, or a bit of a mess ...
Unfortunately, the main culprit in this are the electronics, but the majority consider this to be a "solved problem", and focus their attention on the speakers - the result being that very little improvements are occurring in the general health of audio playback.
So if my amplifiers are perfect how come when I change something I perceive a difference?
If my amplifiers all sound the same why is it that 3 amps I have that are the same model but have differing modifications all sound different musically?
Also I don't believe its enough to measure an amp to 100Khz, the best amp I have has been measured to at least 1GHz - Why? Because of RF - the elephant in the room that the majority choose to ignore. RF behaviour of an amplifier can make or break a system and we live in a world where RF levels are ever increasing.
If my amplifiers all sound the same why is it that 3 amps I have that are the same model but have differing modifications all sound different musically?
Also I don't believe its enough to measure an amp to 100Khz, the best amp I have has been measured to at least 1GHz - Why? Because of RF - the elephant in the room that the majority choose to ignore. RF behaviour of an amplifier can make or break a system and we live in a world where RF levels are ever increasing.
Nice one, Xoc1. The easy answer, often given here, is that you're fooling yourself - which saves the person saying it having to think a bit more about things ... they worked out a long time ago that putting coverings over horses' eyes make them better at doing their job - if it ain't broke ...
A decent aiming point is that it can't be heard misbehaving - IME essentially all amplifiers don't pass this test, from a variety of causes. There's a group over in Scandinavia that do intelligent testing along these lines, and have only found one unit that was truly "transparent".
That's a very profound 2 word question! All our audio devices have compromises and we all have differing expectations of which compromises we are prepared to accept. The perfect amplifier might be a wire with gain but someone would probably complain that it amplified a DC offset and RF crap.
I think your on a loser,
Tell me a recording that hasn't been enhanced to make cheap run of the mill equipment sound good, or to make the music sell better!
Create a flat perfect amp if you can and you will reproduce exactly whats on the recording..which might sound better on cheap equipment..
Or packaged to fit the media or compressed or encoded or decoded..
Then you will be saying only certain recordings sound good and all the rest is like a cheap transistor radio when played on your equipment!
Its a bit like looking at a newspaper picture the more you magnify it the more you will realise its full of faults.
Then the horrible realisation that you have to put something back into the transparent amp to make the music listenable.
Regards
M. Gregg
Tell me a recording that hasn't been enhanced to make cheap run of the mill equipment sound good, or to make the music sell better!
Create a flat perfect amp if you can and you will reproduce exactly whats on the recording..which might sound better on cheap equipment..
Or packaged to fit the media or compressed or encoded or decoded..
Then you will be saying only certain recordings sound good and all the rest is like a cheap transistor radio when played on your equipment!
Its a bit like looking at a newspaper picture the more you magnify it the more you will realise its full of faults.
Then the horrible realisation that you have to put something back into the transparent amp to make the music listenable.
Regards
M. Gregg
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LTS in Sweden - has been mentioned a couple of times on dA, and I pointed to the actual review recently here, http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/loun...ch-preamplifier-part-ii-5737.html#post4104460.
Thanks! I assume LTS is Ljudtekniska Sällskapet? Too bad they only have measurement results for one amp on their web site
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