Global Feedback - A huge benefit for audio

[billshurv]

it's been upgraded now. A snip at $30,000 a pair!

 

[xnor]

For $16500 a pair I'd rather have 30dB better performance. That's a LOT of IM products with only 2 tones. I'd let a $1000 amp get by at that level, but fail to see what I am paying so much for.

Any sane person would agree to this. It would be real interesting to search for amps with comparable or even better performance. How cheap could you go?

PS: You're clearly paying for the sexiness. See the first paragraph of the review.
Quotes for laughs: "Maybe it's just me but I've never found any piece of electronic equipment sexy."
"Sexy? God help me, I do think so."
"I have some beliefs that approach religious faith: [...] zero feedback is better than feedback"

And if you just said amen then you're a true believer. To join their church you just need to sign this check..

 

[Bonsai]

Who said it was?



the ongaku sums up why high end audio stopped being about high fidelity decades ago and became man cave jewelry.



Or your ears...

I heard the Ongaku’s at a show in June last year.

Best described as underwhelming

 

[Bonsai]

it's been upgraded now. A snip at $30,000 a pair!

😀

 

[traderbam]

Audio is about reproducing music for a human listener.
The human is the ultimate judge. There is no escaping this.
Denial is futile.😎

 

[billshurv]

fine, you have your own preferences, but you cannot claim fidelity, just pleasant to your ears. Which is fine, but we don't all share your opinions.

 

[sottomano]

I’d posit that in absolute terms those performance figures are shockingly bad given the SOTA.

This is a $16k amplifier.

My intention was to show that it can be done without global feedback, just to falsify some statements.

But if there is an academic contention called "product of $ and %THD", yeah that amp surely is not close to the podium.

 

[xnor]

Audio is about reproducing music for a human listener.
The human is the ultimate judge. There is no escaping this.
Denial is futile.😎

Did you read my post #1895?

It doesn't matter what you prefer. You may prefer these FX amplifiers with expansion and compression effects, coloring distortion, fixed EQ-like interactions with your speaker's impedance, and so on.

But technically, this has nothing to do with accurate, high-fidelity amplification.

 

[traderbam]

@Bill: I can absolutely judge fidelity through experiencing a system.
What your spectrum analyzer and your technical assumptions lead you to predict is irrelevant by comparison.

 

[scottjoplin]

Still waiting for some anarchic ideas.......all we are getting is repetition of old old mantras

 

[billshurv]

@traderbam: no you can't. You can judge preference.

 

[Bonsai]

My intention was to show that it can be done without global feedback, just to falsify some statements.

But if there is an academic contention called "product of $ and %THD", yeah that amp surely is not close to the podium.

What statements are you falsifying?

 

[xnor]

@Bill: I can absolutely judge fidelity through experiencing a system.

And the next person who through his/her subjective judgement comes to a different or even contradictory result is wrong, because you're the audio god?


You may also judge that Earth is flat and the Moon is made of cheese.

Good for you.

 

[traderbam]

You are excusing your inability to solve a difficult engineering problem by claiming any listener of the audio product is incompetent and, instead, you choose an electrical measure whose relevance you have not proven. Daft, I call it.

 

[scottjoplin]

I sure hope Pavel doesn't look in on this thread

Excuse me, audio amplifiers are a difficult engineering problem? Really?

 

[analog_sa]

Best described as underwhelming

Тhe entire AN - Kondo - Qvortrup thing is a mystery to me. "Underwhelming" is perhaps complimenting it. Lots of bad apples in that industry.

 

[xnor]

You are excusing your inability to solve a difficult engineering problem by claiming any listener of the audio product is incompetent and, instead, you choose an electrical measure whose relevance you have not proven. Daft, I call it.

Even though a ridiculous statement, at least you admit it's an engineering problem!
For a moment there I thought that you think this is an art problem.


Since you seem to know better, which electrical measures other than noise, linear and nonlinear distortions do you suggest to measure electrical amplification fidelity (which literally can be defined through lack of noise, linear and nonlinear distortion)?

 

[jan.didden]

Mister, you might be out of luck with youtube. Rest assured there are 'great sounding' amplifiers without feedback.

I leave to readers what 'great sounding' means.

I think the point is that you can design an amp without global nfb but you cannot design an amp without any feedback. Show me an amp and I'll show you the nfb.

Jan

 

[sser2]

.. and the fallacious argumentation continues. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You clearly belong to what I described. Only ideological black/white thinking.



There are several issues with these statements as well.
First, there are people that are technically interested, that want to understand the circuits, different techniques employed. People, that want to push what is possible even if there's no obvious practical benefit. Limits regarding weight, size, cost, simplicity, linearity, and so on.
Is there some audible benefit to adding another "0" to already vanishing low distortion numbers? No, but it's still an achievement. Technical superiority. A challenge, that some enjoy to tackle.

This is also what drives technological progress.


Sadly, there are also the ideologically driven simpletons that demonize things like global negative feedback. To them, the hobby seems to be congratulating each other on the next more expensive purchase which obviously is an upgrade, duh (even if the amps are so nonlinear that they cause audible effects). Confirmation bias echo chambers.

Secondly, it's again not as simple as "low distortion can be achieved without global NFB". As others have pointed out, for powerful amps (and not mW headphone amps) the distortion actually isn't always that low, and the output impedance still can be high enough to cause an EQ effect.

And some people prefer having a fixed high output impedance that causes an EQ effect, or distortion so high that it audibly colors the sound. Which is totally fine! But that is a matter of personal taste (or lack thereof), not of technical facts.
And I think this is where (a part of) audiophilia has gone completely wrong. Because these people failed to correlate technical facts with subjective, biased experiences, they raise their experiences onto a level that allows them to - seemingly objectively, but this is just an illusion - discriminate between tastes .. and look down on others with "lesser" tastes.
Technical facts are irrelevant for them. They're merely ideological tools.


One would think that this is absurd and could not be true, but the industry has actually adjusted to this and makes good money off of them.

A synopsis of your long post is that some get carried away by the process and forget the original purpose. Vanishingly low measured distortion becomes obsession. But there is no objective evidence for good measurements correlating with good sound. Their is faith, nothing more. You ridicule subjectivists for their faith, without noticing that you are as ridiculous with your objectivist faith.

 

[spladski]

I can argue that GNFB has set progress back in music reproduction in the sense that it has focussed too much attention on poorly correlated measurements, very often to the detriment of the music.

t seems weird that feedback in its many forms, is employed for the creation of recorded material in the first instance. Yet is responsible for damaging the thing it helped create.