Your viewpoint is a colourful and personal one, Bare. You have told us before that even a consumer chipamp application sounds much better than an Arcam A10. Well, it need not be so in the experience of others. Folk of different age groups and tastes often prefer varying amounts of harmonic distortion whilst others prefer a clean and clinical sound - whatever mixes best with their speakers, room, program material, mood and even for pro. studio applications.
A clue lies in your preference for F6 which, if nothing else, adds an appreciable amount of sweetening distortion. Quoting NP here, in a Q&A of the first watt series designs:
"Interestingly, the response of the F6 is -3dB at 50 Khz, so you are not hearing what we would call wide bandwidth. What you are probably hearing is the character of a simple single-stage Class A amplifier with a modest amount of feedback.
The design has very little in the way of high order harmonic distortion, and in ordinary listening the second harmonic is a modest 0.03% or so, with a lesser amount of third harmonic, keeping the amplifier in the sweet-sounding category."
A clue lies in your preference for F6 which, if nothing else, adds an appreciable amount of sweetening distortion. Quoting NP here, in a Q&A of the first watt series designs:
"Interestingly, the response of the F6 is -3dB at 50 Khz, so you are not hearing what we would call wide bandwidth. What you are probably hearing is the character of a simple single-stage Class A amplifier with a modest amount of feedback.
The design has very little in the way of high order harmonic distortion, and in ordinary listening the second harmonic is a modest 0.03% or so, with a lesser amount of third harmonic, keeping the amplifier in the sweet-sounding category."
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