Hi Dimar, your circuit is comparable to mine in many ways. I hope to find what the two designs sound like, in future. I am sure they will sound different to skilled ears with no prejudice on either side as to what they prefer. I would certainly like somebody like Jack Bybee to like my latest effort enough to both buy it and keep it. John Atkinson too!
Ok, I well understand one your main arbiters is distortion spectrum/'quality' effected by choosing operating points (and typologies), what are your criterion for selecting passive components ?.
How often do you get to hear the final production results of your many design efforts ?.
Dan.
I might be wrong but do some car manufacturers use actual listening tests when evaluating the sound they want for various sounds within the model of the car - door closing, etc
Dan, I don't always hear in my own system what I design. Sometimes I first hear them at shows. This happened recently with the JC-5. They put the amp out at a Chicago show BEFORE I even measured it. NOT GOOD! Well I got one afterward, and after a lot of adjustment of the bias, it sits in my living room driving my Wilson speakers. Now I am adding Bybee tweaks, and the result makes me very, very happy. I finally got digital to sound acceptable, just yesterday. I hope I still find it so today! I am going to try the same test with my associate when he arrives later this morning.
Golf clubs are definitely voiced in some cases. My concept of voicing implies imparting a unique sound the opposite of having one unique "accurate" target. IME the serious music lovers I have met and listened with certainly had "voiced" their systems to their personal tastes.
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Passive components have to both measure well, AND be chosen by a number of independent designers as the best, to be recommended by me. For example, Rel Caps RT polystyrene caps and some PP versions are my favorites. You will find them in the power supply bypasses of virtually all my designs. They just work! Others might prefer a more 'pleasant' sounding coupling cap, but not me. I just don't use coupling caps. I design them out, as this is part of my engineering skill.
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I'm not necessarily saying PMA is not interested in an honest discussion - it's just that I often see this approach in some people who are overly focused on end results - they want the solution rather than an objective examination of currently used methods
It's the exact same as the oft used motto & basically boils down to anyone how has invested their ego in a particular approach will not be swayed very easily. The saying is usually those who 'earn a crust' & used in a derogatory sense to intimate that money corrupts but they miss the bigger picture - it's over-investment in ego that corrupts.
The same applies in the whole bias argument about DBTs - any ego overinvestment in one position or it's opposite is likely to be a bias that will influence the outcome of sighted/knowledge listening & even DBTs (if not designed correctly). But I see you mention that some people are not influenced by such biases to any significant extent. I would suggest that people who don't really care what the result will be can achieve results in 'sighted' listening tests that are no worse than ABX tests & can be far better
Sure, as can those who are 'trained' prior to the 'test' as mentioned in ITU recommendations
Agreed.
I think it is not difficult in solid state designs, to avoid coupling caps, if you want to do so. Could you completely avoid them in designs based on tubes as well?
In all industry sectors, over-engineering is technically an embarrassment and financially a suicide. Exception the niche markets where the so named over-engineering is the excuse (cover story) for charging gobs of money for usually no added benefit.
The saga goes like this:
Lab: Design and build as best as you can.
Commercial world: Design and build as worst as acceptable (conformance to industry standards, which establish the lower bound)
Odd that no one has thrown their hands up in horror about an uber amp with not only tone controls, but also feedforward error correction. Should have the low feedback crowd in palpitations
At last ! Tone controls are coming back . Another "first" from Naim
Naim had made another “first” early 80s when it removed tone controls from pre/integrated amps
George
My dictionary says:
Art, noun:
1 - The products of human creativity; works of art collectively
2 - A superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation
3 - The creation of beautiful or significant things
None of those require one to abandon rationality!
Look, you may think something about my approach an methods and I may think something about your approach and methods. It is not a big deal, I would say, for the reason that we disagree on almost everything related to audio. And this is enough to me not to go into persuading discussions with you, as it makes no sense.
No no no no no no no no and no.
Placebo is not medicine. Placebo is placebo. There are myriad psychological effects that are attached to medical care but placebo does not and cannot have a direct mechanism by which it affects a disease. This accepts those psychological effects are extremely real to the person experiencing them, and does not require any form of insincerity.
The parallel between that and audio electronics for reproduction are alarmingly similar, nonetheless. And I wonder if we had the same relationship to our audio designers as we did in terms patient-physician relationship (where placebo is deception/dishonest).
Similarly, it's worrisome to see Deepak Chopra viewed as anything but a crank, well meaning though he may be.
(Not meant to go after you, Howie, and I get your gist, but am vehemently opposed to any suggestion of placebo as medicine)
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I think it's really important to remember that audio reproduction (past some sort of public address) is a luxury good. Depending on one's tastes and means, that can range anywhere from a couple bucks to hundreds of thousands of dollars (insert local currency of choice). The market forces involved in luxury goods markets are quite different from making a part to spec.
That's not to justify anyone, just that it's designed and marketed to make people happy, not necessarily to perform "best". And those two things get conflated pretty regularly.
That´s not my field of expertise, but i remember having seen studies that seem to confirm real physiological effects associated with placebo "medication". Iirc one was pain medication where even the placebo induced physiological effect could be revoked by giving the antagonists.
Can be or can be not, especially if we relate it to the wine tasting studies, but as i´ve said before we have done a lot of tests and despite that, when looking at well documented experiments it seems that whenever training and accomodation is/was involved the results are very often at least hinting to something perceptable, while "underperformance" is quite rare in this kind of tests.
It´s an interesting question - afair there was a study done by Hrjobartson and Goetzsche in which they concluded that a lot of things were falsely attributed to the placebo effect - as some researchers strongly advocate (in medicine trials) for incorporating a "no treatment arm" in addition to the usual "placebo" and "verum" groups, whenever ethically possible.
Don't have much time to respond, but, yes, there's a very real psychological effect, especially with pain, which is why I tried (and failed, it seems) to make a distinction between the mental aspects and mechanistic effect (e.g. for pain: some sort of nerve block, or a suppression of pain receptors, what have you). Which I think gets to your point about wanting some "no intervention" arms to studies to compare drug vs placebo vs nothing at all. There are plenty of trials out there where doing nothing is compared to doing something (where a placebo would be unethical), but not so much in pain management.
That is more to highlight the complexity of the situation. If I were to draw analogy to audio from placebo, it'd be that I have ZERO problems with someone saying "hey, I got this new whiz-bang part and it makes me happy". Mechanistically it may be essentially no different from the prior thing one had, or it might, but we don't have a good way of knowing.
Not exactly. Not for cancer. At the other end of the spectrum are things we may define as disease because doctors can diagnose and treat them. And some are more more psychological in nature to begin with. It may help to recall that brains are one organ in the body and all the parts of the system interact in complex ways that are not fully understood. One example: the adrenal gland can affect the mind and the mind can affect the adrenal gland, but things are actually more complex than that.
Hm, i think his amps sounds so good, because he participate in DIY on a different level of a nice guy.
Second he never gave bad words for other succesfull designers.
And he seems to be a brillant audio electronics designer with a brilliant marketing strategy.
And at least he learned to suppress discussions with people knowing anything better.
And yes, his products are very pleasant to my ears. Like those ones from JC.
I will never forget my first contact with a Swissmade Mc Kinnie JC 3 Phonostage . I was totally convinced that my Yamaha Preamp C2A integrated Phonostage is the best you can get. Many reviews directed my brain. My taste was much better recflected with the JC-box. No idea why
Maybe the C2A was better in tech Specs, but i kept the JC thing for a long while.
Nowadays we have much better parts with better specs and my ears are no more so good unfortunately, thus i cannot judge really good whats better, just what i like more.
regards
Frank
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