Does designing an amplifier by ear really work?

[ClaudeJ1]

23 minutes ago, Endo said:

The way I read this, the author's point isn't that general agreement exists among listeners–but, rather, agreement exists between accepted specifications and their resulting sound quality; in other words, the specifications and the sound quality for other elements in the chain are, generally speaking, not at odds with each other the way they sometimes can be with power amps (the premise of the article).

Yes, and by instrument, tubes have much higher distortion figures (like 100 times more) than the current champ, which is the Hypex NC series. Speakers are even worse in this regard, yet the pleasant and euphoric distortions of tubes are enjoyed by many people around the world. So, listening is more important than measuring, but either way you need to know up front what you are dealing with. "You can't make what you can't measure because you don't know when you have it made." PWK quoting Dr. Irving Gardner.

[babadono]

33 minutes ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

Amps are the audio components most needing in help .....in my listening experience. 

This is where I respectfully have to disagree. By far to my ears THE BIGGEST influencer of what I hear is the loudspeaker. Then the room acoustics. And as @Chris A would say YMMV.

[moray james]

it's easy to design an average to poor to bad sounding amplifier they permeate/saturate the market place (they all want to be oscillators given any reasonable opportunity). Fine well balanced high performing stable and load invariant designs are much harder to find. One only has to look at the mountains of threads of people searching for and discussing the perfect amplifier match for some specific loudspeaker. How much nicer to have an amp that can perform well in a wide variety of situations.

It seems that you are considering that it is the loudspeaker that sounds different and I agree that they do but perhaps it is the impact of the loudspeaker upon the amplifier which results in the bulk of what you hear. I believe that this is often the case. with solid stable amplifiers you can drive a lot of different load loudspeakers and overall characters will remain much the same but for the expected differences one might expect form response differences. This is just a slightly different way of looking a situation. Makes sense to me from my experience but it may not to others.

[DizRotus]

3 hours ago, dwilawyer said:

You should have been a lawyer.

 

 

You sound like my late mother.  Unfortunately, a waterskiing mishap sent me to law school on crutches.  After more than twenty years “practicing” law, I started a small business.  The last decade plus, as a recovering attorney in my encore career, has been much more enjoyable.  I still pay bar dues; for ~$300/year it’s worth  it to keep my wife happy.  

 

My last client was years ago when our younger son’s life was going up in smoke.  Despite his antics, I was able to resolve his legal problems without a misdemeanor conviction.  Fortunately, his frontal lobe has now developed.  It’s like dealing with a different person.

[DizRotus]

25 minutes ago, DizRotus said:

. . . without a misdemeanor conviction.

 

If someone else posted this, I would have asked:

 

“But what about your son, did he avoid a misdemeanor conviction too?”

 

At which point Carl @CECAA850 and Mike @MookieStl would have rolled their eyes.

[MookieStl]

8 minutes ago, DizRotus said:

 

If someone else posted this, I would have asked:

 

“But what about your son, did he avoid a misdemeanor conviction too?”

 

At which point Carl @CECAA850 and Mike @MookieStl would have rolled their eyes.

My intention has always been for you to exercise moderation in your attempt at puns.

Now that you have become your own straight man, I see no possible end in sight. I can still hope.

(I'm sure you can find a couple witty retorts to this post as well!)

You've been working overtime lately being the voice of reason and an entertainer as well. Must be exhausting.

Have fun, I secretly enjoy a few of them on rare occasions.

[DizRotus]

2 minutes ago, MookieStl said:

Now that you have become your own straight man, I see no possible end in sight. I can still hope.

 

If I recall correctly,  my father warned me about this; something to do with blindness, or am a confused . . . again?

[CECAA850]

Bwaaaaahaaaaaahaaaa

[Endo]

5 hours ago, dwilawyer said:

I like class D chip amps, zip cord, and hi-res digital

I drink boxed wine, roll my bike through stop signs, and disapprove of children having unsupervised access to MP3s.

[ClaudeJ1]

2 hours ago, moray james said:

Fine well balanced high performing stable and load invariant designs are much harder to find

Not really. Hypex NC 400 is the answer.

[Travis In Austin]

5 minutes ago, ClaudeJ1 said:

Not really. Hypex NC 400 is the answer.

I heard the Benchmark AHB2 is now the low distortion champion.

[ClaudeJ1]

7 minutes ago, dwilawyer said:

I heard the Benchmark AHB2 is now the low distortion champion.

Bruno Putzeys has a new one which may be a smidge better, but even on the NC series, new measurement methods were needed because traditional ones could not detect the distortion, since it was too low to measure. Nowadays it's NEUTRAL Class D vs. the Euphoric Distortions of Tubes. They both sound good with the right speakers.

[tube fanatic]

6 hours ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

If so,  any classically trained EE can add an out-of-time negative feedback loop back to an earlier stage, and the amplifier WILL measure better.  But the NFB loop, among other nasties,  blunts dynamics, and the " cure" of using NFB is typically to my listening, often worse than the original zero feedback playback !! 

 

Any fb loop which runs from the opt secondary back to the driver (even with only 2 stages in my experience) can be prone to some phase distortion issues.  However, applying small amounts of fb locally at each stage pretty much eliminates that problem.  I find with SEPs that some fb is needed and, if carefully applied, can result in an almost SET like midrange/top end and tighter/more potent bass which is useful for speakers like LSs and Heresys.  That said, if a SEP is used at a small percentage of its total output power (say less then 25%), the distortion is usually quite low and the resultant sound very nice without using fb.  We get into some definite personal taste issues here.

 

In regard to the Hypex and Benchmark amps, I seem to recall that both use some nfb.  Does anyone have definite info about that? 

 

Getting back to Cheever's thesis, I mentioned being fascinated by his discussion of the response of our auditory systems to harmonics and have started doing some research.  So far, this article has been the most informative (it's a bit heavy in neuroanatomy but lots of info can be gleaned even if you don't have a strong background):

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3865599/

 

All of this raises some important points in regard to why some of us prefer certain types of sound from our audio systems.  Apparently, there can be some wide variations in our  neural wiring.  Perhaps this is why some like the harmonic signatures of SETs vs SS vs PP and so on.  And, in my mind, it can certainly account for why one person can be enthralled by one type of sound while another is driven out of the room.  I'll have to continue reading about this as I go along. 

 

 

Maynard

 

 

[Endo]

2 hours ago, Tube Hawk 6AQ5 said:

The age of real men is dead

How might this type of thread be different if it were happening during an age of real men?

EDIT: I'm being serious.

Edited June 29, 2019 by Endo

[Zen Traveler]

6 hours ago, Tube Hawk 6AQ5 said:

Cheese and rice, the banter on this forum was no worse than what is experienced in high school football and wrestling locker rooms or in the military.  The age of real men is dead, sadly replaced by junior high hall monitors policing audio forums. Bravo!

Fwiw, I would separate out high school/college antics with what folks in the military deal with. Imo, the problem with today's social media/forum dialog is all of the non-sequiturs and name calling which detracts from at the subject at hand. If folks spent more time thinking about what they are going to post in that regard instead of calling someone who disagrees with them an "idiot" or the like I think carries over from political discussions...that's my take.

[polizzio]

13 hours ago, Tube Hawk 6AQ5 said:

Cheese and rice, the banter on this forum was no worse than what is experienced in high school football and wrestling locker rooms or in the military.  The age of real men is dead, sadly replaced by junior high hall monitors policing audio forums. Bravo!

 

My reply is those high school days are long gone. Most of us (the majority) are now adults and we are much smarter, and are way more emotionally mature than our high school days. We have some filter in our spoken words, thoughts, and comments. Of course this may not apply to all. We also have our life experiences and what we learned over the years. I can only speak for myself but I am a way way better man today than I was at age 18.

Our society exists with rules and laws........for without those we would live in anarchy and chaos.

[Zen Traveler]

13 hours ago, Endo said:

15 hours ago, Tube Hawk 6AQ5 said:

The age of real men is dead

How might this type of thread be different if it were happening during an age of real men?

EDIT: I'm being serious.

Edited 12 hours ago by Endo

Fwiw, we DO live in the age of "real men" and this is one of the non-sequiturs I was talking about. I suggest any man feeling that they're  not should find themselves a role model because there are plenty of us out here in the real world.

[Deang]

Obviously stupid and irrational ideas need to be shamed out of existance. 

[DizRotus]

23 minutes ago, Deang said:

Obviously stupid and irrational ideas need to be shamed out of existance. 

 

I agree Dean, but ignoring out of existence, IMO, works better on the Internet.

[Deang]

I don't agree. The internet is where all public discourse takes place. Ignoring dumb stuff increases the liklihood that it will spread.