Your judgement has been clouded by the construction and use of valve amplifiers, which are well known for their pleasant, euphonic colourations.
You obviously enjoy listening to equipment which displays significant sonic artefacts. The 303 was designed specifically to display no sonic artefacts: ie what goes in comes out, albeit in a louder form. It was competently designed. All competently designed amplifers sound the same. This has been proven over and over again in DBTs.
You obviously enjoy listening to equipment which displays significant sonic artefacts. The 303 was designed specifically to display no sonic artefacts: ie what goes in comes out, albeit in a louder form. It was competently designed. All competently designed amplifers sound the same. This has been proven over and over again in DBTs.
I disagree on everything you just said - and mine is a personal experience of the 33-303 combination. There's not much more to be said here really.
Shoog
Your own experience makes you say these things. But its interesting to find out how you've come to these conclusions. For this you need an open mind. This means you must be open to new ideas and arguments. It doesn't mean you should believe just about anything. What is needed for an open minded person to accept a new idea/argument is real proof. And accept that humans can very easily be fooled. It happens to me on a daily basis, so its no reason for shame.
So what in this case is real proof?
A test where no one knew what device was playing, aks a double blind test, and level matched to within 0.1dB equipment. Correctly identifying the equipment repeatedly so that statistical significance has been achieved.
If these conditions are not met, there's a high probability that the test results are wrong.
So a person saying things on the internet certainly doesn't suffice as proof. I hope you can agree with this.
The fundamental problem is that if I asked my brother to choose between his Cyrus and the Quad combination I know he would choose the Cyrus. Why can I say that with certainty - because he has made that comparison and made that choice. He may occassionally switch out the Cyrus for a bit of nostalgia - but it doesn't stay. This is based on long term living with the weaknesses of both. the Quad is not perfect and it fails to deliver on micro detail (because of it poorer noise performance) and on bass because of its lower damping factor. So the conclusion both he and myself have drawn is that the Quad is not in fact neutral and cannot match amps made after it because of these specific weaknesses.
If the Quad had better performance it would be in use and not storage.
Shoog
If the Quad had better performance it would be in use and not storage.
Shoog
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Have you considered that there could be unconscious biases in play? Every time you and your brother knew what amp was playing. Just thinking one amp had better technology can result in false positives.
Double blind testing eliminates these biases.
I get fooled every single day, so can anyone else.
Unfortunately double blind experiments are not particularly effective at picking out the subtle differences between two pieces of equipment, which can take weeks to fully emerge. I don't actually think it is an adequate test between equipment. Having said that the differences between the Quad and the Cyrus would be evident on a relatively brief audition given the issue with damping and noise.
I think there are many examples of competently design pieces of equipment which sound almost identical. I have a solid state mosfet preamp which sounds almost indistinguishable from a completely different topology transformer coupled valve preamp. Put them side by side and it would be difficult to tell them apart. But i don't think the same could be said for a comparison between the Quad and the Cyrus - they are different and obviously so.
Shoog
Double blind test have no time restrictions, take as long as you think necessary.
ABC/HR is very sensitive to detecting the smallest audible differences.
This is a must read article:
Methods for the subjective assessment of small impairments in audio systems
Have you taken precautions to eliminate biases?
As Tatoo says, there need be no time limit on the duration of the double-blind listening tests. If you are saying that there can exist subtle differences between amplifiers that can only be heard if one knows which amplifier one is listening to, then that, to me, is by definition a non-perceptible difference.
Chris
Thats not what I said at all. Subtle differences are qualities such as listener fatigue and what it says about small differences in harmonic profiles and high frequency stability issues.
Shoog
So you did your own DBT of audio equipments and discovered such unfortunate shortcomings?
only some electronics - including the presumed thread topic audio amplifiers can be made audibly transparent if desired with current engineering knowledge
microphones, analog recording/reproduction techs, speakers, rooms all have known audible differences - with decades of engineering dev, papers devoted to characterizing and minimizing
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Yes, indeed. It is odd, in fact, that some audiophiles seem to obsess so much more about the amplifier, which is relatively straightforward to make transparent, than they do about the much more difficult components like the loudspeakers, and the room acoustics. And why not the ears, too? There must be also sorts of tweaks and modifications that a dedicated audiophile could apply to the ears that would enhance the soundstage.
Of course if the person doesn't really want a transparent amplifier, but instead an effects box that adds various kinds of audiophile-approved distortions that are considered to be pleasing, then there are myriad possibilities for his being separated from quite astonishing amounts of money.
Chris
I have to agree with the Pope on this. To my ears and test bench measurements, well designed amps of any type sound fine and distort much less than any of the other parts of the reproduction process. Personally I try to put more focus on speakers and how they interact with room acoustics. Then refurbishment of bad recordings with multi-section Baxandall tone controls that I've designed. I multi-amp my speakers 4th order and use active EQ to make them approx. acoustically flat down to at least 30HZ, which to my ears is a big improvement over most. Dealing with the typical "boominess" that most rooms create in the 80HZ - 300HZ region seems like one of the bigger challenges. There are ways to minimize that with proper speaker design and placement.
Most of my audio engineering hobby life (since 1967) I've been all about Hi-Fi, which is about getting rid of distortion. About 15 years ago an Engineer friend of mine got me into tubes amp design claiming it sounds better. I was an am skeptical, but I dove in deep, researching everything about tubes. Tubes are cool looking and nostalgic so it's been fun. Bringing up the 2nd harmonic distortion product does make individual instruments sound better but it's always a tradeoff with I.M. distortion, so is worse with choral music or any complicated mixes of sounds. A little bit of 2nd harmonic can be nice but you don't want to over do it, and the higher order harmonics are rarely helpful.
Since I have been a blues/rock guitarist since 1970 (wanting to sound like Eric Clapton), I thought I'd get into building tube guitar amps, where it's all about having distortion. I've built about 8 guitar amps so far. It's like being a chef in a kitchen, putting together just the right combination of distortion mechanisms. I have to laugh. The Hi-Fi amp has been done. Been there done that. Why waste more time on that? Guitar amps have been much more intriguing to me in recent years. I can't seem to stop building them. An addiction problem? Maybe. Transistor distortion sounds to me like fingernails on a blackboard. Pretty nauseating. Tube distortion can sound really good if done right. I'm one who hates distortion in general, but if it's really done right, I love it. It actually makes me a much better guitarist, because I love what I'm hearing.
Most of my audio engineering hobby life (since 1967) I've been all about Hi-Fi, which is about getting rid of distortion. About 15 years ago an Engineer friend of mine got me into tubes amp design claiming it sounds better. I was an am skeptical, but I dove in deep, researching everything about tubes. Tubes are cool looking and nostalgic so it's been fun. Bringing up the 2nd harmonic distortion product does make individual instruments sound better but it's always a tradeoff with I.M. distortion, so is worse with choral music or any complicated mixes of sounds. A little bit of 2nd harmonic can be nice but you don't want to over do it, and the higher order harmonics are rarely helpful.
Since I have been a blues/rock guitarist since 1970 (wanting to sound like Eric Clapton), I thought I'd get into building tube guitar amps, where it's all about having distortion. I've built about 8 guitar amps so far. It's like being a chef in a kitchen, putting together just the right combination of distortion mechanisms. I have to laugh. The Hi-Fi amp has been done. Been there done that. Why waste more time on that? Guitar amps have been much more intriguing to me in recent years. I can't seem to stop building them. An addiction problem? Maybe. Transistor distortion sounds to me like fingernails on a blackboard. Pretty nauseating. Tube distortion can sound really good if done right. I'm one who hates distortion in general, but if it's really done right, I love it. It actually makes me a much better guitarist, because I love what I'm hearing.
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Your observations on geetar amps are spot on. But i'd take Buddy Guy and MT over EC 😉
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I agree. There is still room for creativity with musical instrument amps.
But I think there is room left to dramatically improve HiFi. But we are lazy and keep re-building 50 year old ideas. At the very least we should be building powered speakers with one amplifier per driver and active EQ. This way each amp needs only limited bandwidth, intermod goes way down.
There is more,... With today's digital tech you can servo the bass using accelerometers on the voice coils Or you can measure the sound using a microphone at the listening position and adjust phase and EQ with "speaker and room in the loop" all in real time.
There is LOTS os room for DIYers to do stuff but most remain stuck in the mid 20th century.
Going to the nest step. Why are so few audiophile into recording? Recording is the "bigger half" of audio. It used to be very expensive but it's gotten cheap.
Guess what I'm saying is there is so much more to do then compare nearly identical amplifiers
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