John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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Thank you Bill. Do you mean that it is impossible for the search to turn up further understanding? Could you expound the reasons obvious to you that I may not be aware of? :confused:


It's not easy otherwise we would all have motion feedback speakers. Whilst it is possible to try and cancel distortion in the speakers with a predistortion as per Nelsons fun board there are so many gotchas that, IMO it's better off considering it a 'warmth' control.


If you pick your speakers right the 2H distortion is low enough that you have other issues to fix first anyway. Trying to fix the wrong speakers by adding a different distortion profile onto them is the recipe for audiophila nervosa.



Unless you accept that what you prefer is none of anyone elses business and just kick back and enjoy. That also works. :)
 
But Mark, how old are your speakers?

My subs, cross-over caps, and HF drivers are all fairly new. Doesn't matter though, I did not say I used the latest speakers, did I?

I said or was trying to say that if someone thinks that decades ago the best sound was from finding amps that cancel out particular speaker distortion, it is not sufficient reason to conclude how to get the best sound today.
 
Pavel Macura (PMA) indicated similar objection in this thread several pages back. I stipulated that perhaps a wide range high efficiency driver showing currently typical distortion characteristic was simply not available, unpopular or exorbitantly priced at the time of his measurement.

My measurement was done about a week ago, on SEAS W18NX001 driver. This is a nice small woofer with nextel coated paper cone. It keeps low distortion, in 0.1% order of magnitude. That's why I have shown it, as I do not like colorizers compensated by even more colorizing SE tube amplifiers.
And, for a multi-way speaker, any simple formula of trivial distortion cancellation is an illusion. If you ever worked seriously with speaker drivers, you must know what I mean. Otherwise I am just sorry.
 

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mmerrill99 said:
We are also dealing with an art form in the recording of music - it's not a slavish recording of the sounds of the performance - all aspects of the sound are most likely manipulated as part of this art form so like all art forms we are not being served raw reality but a more palatable & hopefully more meaningful version/interpretation.
I agree that recording is an art. Whether the result is more or less palatable is a matter of taste. However, what happens after that is a matter of science, not art - at least for the hi-fi enthusiast.

indra1 said:
I feel the accepted norm to justify accuracy in audio amplifiers is way outdated. Nobody I know of has the ability to directly perceive audio in the form of elecrical signal.

Due to the known issues of tranducer and air induced distorton, accuracy description of amplifiers exclusively on electrical standards is downright misleading, no longer holds water, leads to incorrect assumptions and could be considered fraudulent.

Describing an amplifier performing in a system exhibiting lower distortion measured at listening position as more accurate makes better sense.
Apart from those rare occasions when an amplifier can genuinely compensate for transducer or room problems, accuracy in sound at the listener's ear arises from accuracy in voltage handling in the electronics. In any case, if you want to be able to swap amplifiers or speakers then you need both to attempt accuracy rather than complementary errors.

I don't see why people find 'accuracy' such an offensive word. Perhaps it is because it sounds a virtuous word, but they prefer some degree of innaccuracy so they have to convince us that their inaccuracy is somehow more accurate than our accuracy? Hence we hear about 'synergy' (i.e. the amp distorts in the opposite way to the speakers) or 'musicality' (i.e. the amp distorts in a way which I like) set in opposition to our accuracy - which they regard as 'clinical' or 'conventional'.

morinix said:
All this talk about THD and accurate reproduction.
Who mentioned THD? Wait a minute - you just did!

Mark Johnson said:
Some people hold opinions such as these:

"For reproducing music as naturally as possible, push-pull operation is not the best approach. Air is not symmetric and does not have a push-pull characteristic.
Air is fairly close to being symmetric. It is certainly more symmetric than single-sided, so the nearest approximation to air is PP not SE. Maybe the author was attempting humour?
 
RNMarsh said:
An over looked issue with high dielectric constant caps... in particular, ceramic caps.
I think you meant to say "A well known issue with high dielectric constant caps - in particular, high dielectric constant ceramic caps"?


It puzzles me why someone looks back 40 years to find a circuit where the designer cynically designed-in some second order distortion by unbalancing an LTP, and then implying that we should copy this. All it shows is that mild FX boxes pretending to be audio equipment are not new.
 
... Why don't you try listening to an exemplary clean system of today?
Because an F5 clone Amp tuned to have about 0.3% leftover negative phase 2H sounded better to me compared to the same amp tuned to produce minimum distortion on my SB Acoustics Satori drivers. However, typical noise around my house prevented meaningful measurement of total system distortion.
It's not easy ...
... Unless you accept that what you prefer is none of anyone elses business and just kick back and enjoy. That also works. :)
Yes Bill, not easy is obvious. I am curious and willing to spend more effort if there still exists a chance of finding clearer understanding. Your previous comment worried me that somebody already proved that the mechanism has nothing to do with accuracy on conversion of recorded material to a listenable form.

Thanks for the advice, has been working well for me for a long while. :)
 
So-called 'High end' is almost always expensive, so it should be whatever the customer wants it to be. Market forces will ensure this.

Best thing I have read from you - it's not even condescending!

Personally I don't buy the 'a little added distortion makes it sound more like the real thing' argument. For that to happen you would need to know what distortions were added in the reproduction chain and seek to undo them. However, I come from the 'accuracy' camp so I would say that, wouldn't I?

Then you simply don't understand the behavior of speakers.

Curiuously, many people in the 'illusion' camp like to talk as though they are in the 'accuracy' camp: they claim that their preferred system has lower (unspecified, unmeasured) distortion even though it has higher (specified, measurable, sometimes audible) distortion than a system designed using 'conventional engineering'.

Audiophile use all the same words, for TOTALLY different things than measurements- this is true. "Linearity" to many of them is based on voltage sag in the amp, because the device sank too much current and flopped on it's face. Reality? The sound may have been utterly perfectly linear in playback with distortion in the thousands.

If you want to understand their concerns, setup a system where you can adjust feedback. Go between a lot and little. You'll very quickly discover the heart of what countless audiophiles are judging.
 
... for a multi-way speaker, any simple formula of trivial distortion cancellation is an illusion. ...
Thank you for the woofer data Mr. Macura, I fully agree with your statement I quoted above. I take it that you find bi/tri/quad amping using LLXO of little significance.
... In any case, if you want to be able to swap amplifiers or speakers then you need both to attempt accuracy rather than complementary errors....
Or include a method to tune and optimize total generated distortion that some amplifiers provided. I really do wish that reasonably priced ppm distortion driver accuracy is achievable real soon. But in the mean time, why are attempts that may alleviate the problem from amplifier side being frowned upon?
I don't see why people find 'accuracy' such an offensive word.
Because it is being offensively used to ridicule other amplifiers simply for intrinsic higher electrical distortion disregarding cancellation effect. I suspect this attitude arising from insufficient understanding hampers progress.
... Air is fairly close to being symmetric. ...
Perhaps so, but non intuitive to me. It is way easier to extinguish the flame of a candle by blowing compared to inhaling.
Using what source? What hardware, what type of music? Busy and dense, soloist?
Mostly CD quality flacs on my HP pavillion laptop, mp3 on various smartphones and a Marrantz CD player belonging to a deceased cousin. I prefer mostly jazz and soloists, but did listen to Pink Floyds, ELPs and various Sheffield Lab CDs.
 
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I agree that recording is an art. Whether the result is more or less palatable is a matter of taste. However, what happens after that is a matter of science, not art - at least for the hi-fi enthusiast.
if you agree that recording is an art (i.e. massaged & manipulated acoustically) then this directly contradicts what you said before of what Hi-fidelity was all about - fidelity to the original acoustic event which I believe you said was the ideal comparison regarding fidelity. But do you agree that what is picked up through microphones is only a small slice of the soundfield & expecting fidelity to the original acoustic event is thus logically & technically flawed as a result? All we can expect to achieve is the best illusion possible.

If instead you actually mean the fidelity to the crafted illusion that the recording engineer has created through psychoacoustic audio manipulation of the original event we are in a different territory - unless you were at the final mix down & heard what the engineer heard through his speakers/room, then you have nothing to compare to & anyway, even if you were there, many here say memory of sound is so flawed that only echoic memory is to be trusted - so a real Catch-22

I believe the only sensible approach is in our evaluation of the realism of the illusion produced & we evaluate this with different systems - does A device in the system produce a more realistic illusion than B - it's a relative evaluation, based on our internal auditory models of real world sound & behavior.
 
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if you agree that recording is an art (i.e. massaged & manipulated acoustically) then this directly contradicts what you said before of what Hi-fidelity was all about - fidelity to the original acoustic event which I believe you said was the ideal comparison regarding fidelity.

Where did DF96 define hi fi as "fidelity to the original acoustic event "?
 
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