PMA and others do a great disservice to Charles Hansen. This is of course why it is so difficult for him to bother contributing. He has been, of late, but Charles and I, for example, have our opinions and this is not marketing hype. You people have your opinions as well. I will try to not laugh at your opinions, if you don't laugh at our opinions.
Its clear tha t both you and Charles have designed and built some very good sounding equipment - I read the reviews and have no reason to doubt the many writers who have praised your products. Unfortunately, I have not heard any of your stuff, but that is beside the point because a lot of other designs using different topologies and components also get good reviews.
What is difficult to accept is that there is only one way to design an amp or a pre-amp - your way. You can have a good design and a good sounding amp, but does not negate the other approaches. You guys know your topology and chosen components how to get the best out of them. Other people work with their chosen topologies and know how to get the best out of them.
Pity then that some people feel compelled to put in writing views that are quite frankly completely erroneous. Pity also that John Atkinson printed it as well
What is difficult to accept is that there is only one way to design an amp or a pre-amp - your way. You can have a good design and a good sounding amp, but does not negate the other approaches. You guys know your topology and chosen components how to get the best out of them. Other people work with their chosen topologies and know how to get the best out of them.
Pity then that some people feel compelled to put in writing views that are quite frankly completely erroneous. Pity also that John Atkinson printed it as well
I boldly claim that the average DIYer would build better sounding equipment with good modern OP-AMPs for instance than if he would be trying to build extreme discrete designs.
John Curl and Charles Hansen OTOH are skilled engineers and will be able to get most out of discrete designs.
But Charles' statement about resistors and specially caps in silicon is true IMO.
But this has nothing to do with the comparison of analog/digital. Digital circuits are less affected by imperfections of integrated capacitors and resistors and therefore integrated digital solutions will almost always be better than discrete ones.
It is the analog and the mixed-signal part of circuits where careful discrete designs have their advantage IMO.
Regards
Charles
John Curl and Charles Hansen OTOH are skilled engineers and will be able to get most out of discrete designs.
But Charles' statement about resistors and specially caps in silicon is true IMO.
But this has nothing to do with the comparison of analog/digital. Digital circuits are less affected by imperfections of integrated capacitors and resistors and therefore integrated digital solutions will almost always be better than discrete ones.
It is the analog and the mixed-signal part of circuits where careful discrete designs have their advantage IMO.
Regards
Charles
Hi,
My original point was not to compare digital to analog, but rather to say that from the source to your ears is a chain. We all know about the weakest link in the chain.
Think very carefully about the laws of economics. What Mr. Hansen said is quite true, if you could make a better cap out of silicon than out of polypropylene or teflon, we would have little black chunks of silicon with leads sticking out of each end for use as discrete capacitors!
My original point was not to compare digital to analog, but rather to say that from the source to your ears is a chain. We all know about the weakest link in the chain.
Think very carefully about the laws of economics. What Mr. Hansen said is quite true, if you could make a better cap out of silicon than out of polypropylene or teflon, we would have little black chunks of silicon with leads sticking out of each end for use as discrete capacitors!
Nelson Pass said:All this presumes that the National chips have silicon resistors
and capacitors in them. Generally chip designers prefer matched
transistors over resistors and capacitors on chips and avoid them
wherever possible.
...which is why it all boils down to what they sound like relative to our personal reference...
Forget the technology. If we had settled for the first generation of CD technology, nobody would be listening to music anymore because of the boredom and the headache. The engineering went on and today it's quite listenable. The same could possibly be true of the much maligned op-amp. Just because the technology has suffered in the past doesn't mean it can't rise above its seedy beginnings.
It's the skeptics in this world who fuel progress, but they can also be the ones to inhibit it. It's quite possible that National Semiconductor has smart, passionate, audiophile engineers who have worked hard to overcome the limitations of the op-amp when applied to audio...
I'll be the first one to admit I don't believe it; I'm heavily biased because of all of the years of searching for the Grail. But the engineer in me says it's possible.
So why not pony up the bucks for a couple of these, get some perfboard from radio shack, build a drop-in replacement for your preamp gain stage and give them a listen?
Sorry, this one's too easy.
Regards, Mike.
HaflerFreak said:
Apples & oranges
This really is nonsense... if you had some knowledge of manufacturing techniques for various devices, you'd understand that both technologies have bad examples and good examples.
Many examples exist of devices fabricated from your "dirty sand" used in, for instance radio astronomy, sattelite communications, etc., that require intrinsic capacitance, modulated multilayer structures in silicon and other materials (indium phosphide, etc.) that would be impossible to manufacture if high quality resistance and capacitance micro structures in semiconductors were unfeasible.
erfc, etc. defines the doping profile and hence conduction band/band gap in these materials, which can be controlled to a very high degree of accuracy. That there are lousy implementations of this is not surpising, but doesn't condemn the technology, which is what is implied in such a stupid generalization.
Bob, d'ya think that might be a bit extreme? FWIW, I disagree with Charles about this (at least his reasoning), but my stomach contents seem to still be going in their usual direction. He's an intelligent guy who has accomplished much but just happens to believe something I think is wrong and argues for it forcefully and (at least to many others) persuasively, and certainly entertainingly. I think you could make a more substantive criticism of his arguments without dipping down into mudslinging.
Arius said:
You are jumping to conclusions. The reason that each input needs to break in separately is not because of the input selector switch, but because of the PCB material underneath the traces. (It's interesting, but the higher performance PCB materials require much longer break-in times than does regular FR-4, in my experience. FR-4 doesn't change all that much during the break-in period, but higher performance materials do.)
As far as input switches go, I don't really like the sonic performance of relays. If you look at how they are made, how many dissimilar metals are used, the lack of self-cleaning action on the contacts, the poor geometry of the conductors, and the proximity of ferrous materials, it is not surprising that relays don't sound as good as a really good rotary switch.
Arius said:
First of all, I doubt it is true that "all professional recording equipment contains [ferrite-based] AC chokes". But any equipment that does use ferrite will have a sonic degradation over time. I should know, I learned the hard way. For about two years we used ferrite-based filters on the incoming AC of our equipment. Probably the single biggest mistake I ever made. (Well at least with regards to the design of hi-fi equipment.)
Bob Cordell said:
I guess you're like the fat guy in the last sketch of Monty Python's "Meaning of Life":
Q: How are you?
A: Better. Better bring me a bucket.
You're probably right Bob. How can we unedjumacated flim-flam artists hope to compete with the geniuses at the IC design firms?
It's kind of like cooking. How can some stupid French pastry chef possibly hope to compete with Betty Crocker? Everyone knows that Betty makes the best cakes in the world. She uses the best ingredients, fine-tunes the recipe to perfection, and makes it available to everyone for a very reasonable price. It is the sheerest of folly for some over-inflated ego of a cook to think that he might be able to make something better than Betty Crocker.
And just think. By this time next year, all of the best audio gear will be using the new National IC's. All the way from the $499 preamps to the $40,000 state-of-the-art jobs from the boutique manufacturers. You can't beat National, so why not join them?
Nelson Pass said:
Uhmm...
Nelson, in the past there were a few very expensive IC's that had thin-film laser-trimmed resistors. These are known as hybrid circuits. Very few are made these days, and certainly none that I know of for audio use.
Let me give you a good example. I was curious about the resistor value in a particular part of an Analog Devices IC. I contacted them and they said that the part had been designed before the days of computers and that they couldn't find the documentation. So Scott Wurcer (who posts here from time-to-time) took a mil-spec version of one of the parts (with the sealed metal can), cut the top off and examined the part under a microscope. By measuring the dimensions of the resistor (made of silicon) he could tell me the resistance value.
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