Well there's no way I can just let it rest. I want to either figure out its bogus or figure out it's not. Being in lingo sucks especially considering the work I put into it. But here's my take. If I can make a 100W amplifier with -150db specs I think investors would be interested. Now, whether or not I can do that is another story but it's something I want to try. For headphones I can basically make the distortion invisible no matter what.
However even if none of this was the case the sound quality is much better than anything I've heard on or off the market and I've heard a lot. Again that is mostly a dac thing but there are so many amps that just sound bad. For me I've reached my personal nirvana, only the Smyth Realiser could make it better. I also have a small following of people that have heard my systems and have been converted. But every time I go to an audio convention I leave wondering why the standards of "hi-fi" are so low. I feel like I have something to offer regardless. But anyway, I ultimately can't rest until I confirm or deny the performance of the main circuit of interest here.
However even if none of this was the case the sound quality is much better than anything I've heard on or off the market and I've heard a lot. Again that is mostly a dac thing but there are so many amps that just sound bad. For me I've reached my personal nirvana, only the Smyth Realiser could make it better. I also have a small following of people that have heard my systems and have been converted. But every time I go to an audio convention I leave wondering why the standards of "hi-fi" are so low. I feel like I have something to offer regardless. But anyway, I ultimately can't rest until I confirm or deny the performance of the main circuit of interest here.
Okay you people have successfully whittled me down. I give in.
Hey Scott, wana sign an NDA and help me out? 🙂
You live pretty close and have a respectable reputation.
Hey Scott, wana sign an NDA and help me out? 🙂
You live pretty close and have a respectable reputation.
Well Victor's fine oscillator gets about -140 dB errors and I believe are set up for 1k if I remember correctly. A fantastic DM might let you see a little further, but your loopback performance is going to run out steam well before that -150 dB.
I don't think that is anyone's intent. I no longer have the patience for this stuff. You might try and call Dick Sequerra IIRC he is in CT and he has an open mind, you should certainly be able to mount a demonstration (circuit hidden in box) otherwise I don't know how you are going to convince anyone of anything.
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This is so conflictual with your previous claims...so a certain -290db became a possibly... -150 . There are no "audio" investors...audio manufacturers will steal anything if possible.They don't care about your ideas if they don't prove anything worthless, i mean that can bring them MONEY, a lot of them and in a very short amount of time.
At this level of distortion the medical and physical chemistry analyzer manufacturers MIGHT be interested, but they are going to ask you something that audio will never care about: FOR HOW LONG is your amp able to provide that THD and they are talking about 24 hours....10 days , continuous display of that very low and unmeasurable THD and you'll have to show them on a display that your THD is constant.I wonder how are you going to do that.
Let's say...if you measure the ne5532 thd you will see that is very low, but at the same time it varies from second to second and you'll read different figures on your AP .You get a higher THD op-amp like opa2134 and you see that its THD is much higher, but much more stable.That is what really matters in audio, stability. Extreme performance is futile in audio.Everything will be listened on some speakers with at least 1000 X the THD of a good op-amp of today. Every op-amp manufacturer has audio op-amps and special op-amps for military and industry , specified to work over -55...150 degrees Celsius.
Those op-amps are better than the audio op-amps, but they costs a lot more.It's like with the "audio branded" TPA6120 of THS6012 which reveals the whole datasheet and better performance than needed in audio, but more expensive at the same time.I haven't seen anybody to try the THS6012 and claim it was better than TPA6120 just because at that level of performance TPA6120 is good enough for all human hearing.
You'd be really wise if you wouldn't play the "commercial value" card of high end audio. The best and the most expensive near field monitors in the audio industry are made with class d Hypex amplifiers...
I already mentioned that the best possible EC will not be able to correct its own noise. The JND of our auditory system is at the best 1 Hz, so “hearing into the noise” will be limited to this 1Hz, dictating the lower limit for the bin width of the measuring FFT. Suppose you have a fantastic 1nV/rtHz EC circuit and the input voltage for your 100Watt amp is 1Volt, than the theoretical limit for EC would even be -180dB. So -150dB will be certainly achievable.
There are several threads on this forum with 100 Watt amps with THD in the ppm range. Apply an appropriate EC correction around this amp, 1 or at the most 2 op-amps and you have your -150dB specs at the flick of a switch. Why should any invester be interested if it so simple to achieve ?
In the second half of your reply you mention that your “invention” sounds better than anything else. Well that might trigger an investor, no matter what the THD is, but you have to able to explain why it sounds so much better, which will not be easy
Hans
One option could be to get someone who regularly participates in hifi shows to give you a space on his stand to get public opinion on your setup. He'll want something in return but you got to get started somewhere.
BTW Statements like 'it sounds better than anything else I have ever heard' don't mean a lot because everybody says that ...
Jan
If you do a test based on false understanding then no matter how many times you repeat the test or redesign the test it will always give the same false result.hellokitty123 said:
No. Distortion arises from a signal and a circuit combined. Change either and you get different distortion. To model the distortion of a complex circuit for any reasonable signal you would probably need to replicate the circuit - I assume you have not done this? Hence reducing the signal level changes the distortion. You cannot assume that your EC continues to track the distortion down to lower levels, and you cannot measure at very low levels. Hence your basic assumption is simply false, as we keep telling you.
Why you find this so difficult to grasp is unclear. I can only assume that some combination of enthusiasm and lack of understanding has clouded your mind.
I dunno, I guess I'm just really dumb. 🙁 I'll just stick to making a 100W+ amp and seeing if I can keep the distortion below the noise floor under all conditions within spec. I sent an email to that fellow that Scott recommended as well.
What has hearing into the noise got to do with it? This thread is about measurements, extrapolations and selling amplifiers, so whatever anyone can or cannot hear is totally irrelevant.
Hi Marcel,
We obviously come from different planets.
According to you, when selling amplifiers it is absolutely irrelevant what anyone can hear.
That’s a very special view on the subject of amplifiers.
Hans
I think it depends on the market and audience. It's like the old CPU clock speed wars. People in the know knew that clock speed doesn't matter and it was not the bottleneck to system performance but the average person thought it was a standard measurements of performance.
I don't know about the speaker market but in the headphone market spec figures and fancy words still drive the market and the main audience is a more or less average person even at the high end.
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O.k., so you are going to make the best sounding 100Watt amplifier for the headphone market for average people that are only interested in specs ?
Hans
Hans
He didn´t say that.
He´s clearly talking about *this* thread, which focuses exactly on what he mentions, and not on the Universe of amplifiers as you seem to imply.
Besides that, two numbers are consistently mentioned here, -290dB (original claim) and -150dB which apparently is the acknowledged measurement limit ... I VERY MUCH doubt anybody can hear that low level of distortion, so even if not said, it´s actually truth, go figure.
Not sure why you add straw man arguments to a thread which is already complicated by itelf 🙄
You can already make a headphone amplifier that achieves nearly unmeasurable distortion without your error correction circuit. That's been done by JCX and a few others with composite amplifiers. It will be a hard sell compared to the THX AAA based amplifiers like the Massdrop AAA 789 for only $349.
That's another thing you should find some advice from someone that understands the market and the financial issues. This would require no disclosure of what you have but might make you aware of the harsh realities. Your comment about "making a 1000 of these and selling them for $1000@" is fairly naive. At $1000 MSRP if your total BOM, boxed and ready to ship is much over $250 you are probably making very little in the end.
If you think you are going to sell them with no review samples, no reviews, and no dealers it is probably a mistake. First of all most (all?) reviewers will simply put them on an AP and say they can't confirm any claims over its residual distortion.
I was slightly exaggerating, of course. When the distortion of an amplifier is so large that it can actuaĺly be heard, that will have an effect (which could be positive or negative) on sales.
I do believe, though, that the distortion of many if not most amplifiers is far too small to be audible (as it ought to be). That doesn't stop anyone from measuring it and using it as a selling point when the measured value is unusually low.
When measuring distortion levels beyond the capabilities of the human auditory system and using the measured values as selling points is normal practice, I don't see what's wrong with measuring in a bandwidth smaller than the critical bandwidths of the human auditory system. So if the expected distortion is so low that the harmonics need to be measured over a 1 microhertz bandwidth in order not to drown in the noise, that will lead to a couple of practical measurement issues, but not to any fundamental lower limit on the achievable distortion.
No problem, I can agree with most of what you say. I'm also pushing a bit because it's still not to obvious to me what the design goals are: the lowest distortion, the best sounding, the best price performance, selling 1000 amps with little profit, selling a patent ??
But when aiming for -150dB distortion, depending on the amount of noise, you will need a certain measuring bandwidth to make this distortion visible. The smaller this bandwidth, the deeper you can look into the distortion. But suppose the highly unlikely situation we could hear -150dB THD, if we match the bin width to our hearing resolution of 1Hz, my conclusion was that that the maximum noise that enables measuring -150dB THD is not that difficult to achieve with around 20nV/rtHz RTI.
As Scott mentioned, first thing a reviewer will do is to connect the amp to an AP to verify the low THD. But what will then be the bin width that he will be using ? I don't expect this to be in the sub Herz region, that's why I came with this practical value of 1Hz, which doesn't seem to be a hurden.
Hans
But when aiming for -150dB distortion, depending on the amount of noise, you will need a certain measuring bandwidth to make this distortion visible. The smaller this bandwidth, the deeper you can look into the distortion. But suppose the highly unlikely situation we could hear -150dB THD, if we match the bin width to our hearing resolution of 1Hz, my conclusion was that that the maximum noise that enables measuring -150dB THD is not that difficult to achieve with around 20nV/rtHz RTI.
As Scott mentioned, first thing a reviewer will do is to connect the amp to an AP to verify the low THD. But what will then be the bin width that he will be using ? I don't expect this to be in the sub Herz region, that's why I came with this practical value of 1Hz, which doesn't seem to be a hurden.
Hans
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