The Emperor's New Amplifier (2003)
normankoren.com
normankoren.com
Consider that the gear Miles Davis made all his music through sounded completely fucked by this guy's standards. For some reason, harmonic distortion produced before the 80s is art, and harmonic distortion produced after the 80s is an affront. Its like some kind of analog/digital existential nostalgia. I blame postmodernism.
The more transparent the amplifier, the better the music has to be, or you really are wasting your time. If you just want to build high performance electronic equipment, there are much more interesting areas to work in than simply applying gain to a pair of AC signals while preserving their phase relationship.
But yeah, each to his own I guess. I expect these questions are half the fun if you're into designing your own amplifiers.
In other words, harmonic distortion is art if it was put there during the recording process and not art if it is put there during the playback process.
When you abandon the traditional audiophile silliness of subjective judgements in favor of scientific measurement, you just enter an even deeper mire, and it becomes completely impossible to determine why you're doing what you're doing, or what you're looking for.
The best thing about art, and especially music is that your soul/subconcious/whatever can tell you if its good or not, immediately, for free. Your brain does not need six sigma of certainty to decide if you should currently be weeping with joy.
Also, digital distortion is not harmonic distortion. That's why you preferably don't want to have it on a recording (unless you have a very specific taste or want your music to glitch or sound robotic or whatever).
Anyway, most sources sound better through a superior playback system than through an inferior one. I have no problem listenings to the Wiper's "Youth of America" through a proper HiFi. There might be some odd exceptions that sound better through a Tivoli mono speaker, but those are far and few between. So I wouldn't let that be my concern while designing the best playback system I can. I definitely wouldn't call it a problem.
This built an entire sociology of competitive audio listening, like a much nerdier version of the car performance tinkering of the same time. People got very emotionally invested in this kind of quality one-upsmanship.
In the 80s MOSFET amps became viable, cheap and widespread. The baseline quality was now so much better that non-experts stopped caring much - you could buy anything in the hifi shop and get reasonable results. But the culture lives on, lost in the jungle, worshipping at a shrine that almost all the population has abandoned.
TVs and computer graphics are approaching this tipping point from "more money buys you noticeably more quality" to "actually I can't see the difference from the cheap baseline and neither can the people I want to show off to". Notice how 4k hasn't taken off dramatically.
And BTW gaming motherboards now commonly have audio interfaces with isolated power rails and stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_High_Definition_Audio
The real benefits of a macbook is the 192 kHz (on recent models) tosLink optical out integrated into the headphone jack, which is just an awesome feature that I really wish other laptop manufacturers would pick up.
DSPs for resonances/tuning has however been picked up pretty widely (under a wide variety of brandings/quality)
These days - spend your money on anything of reasonable price and you'll get excellent sound. They're marketed more on features (i-device integration, network audio, etc) than audio quality, because decent sound quality has become a given.
I still have some of the CDs from the mid-80s. Pink Floyd The Wall sounds like they just dumped the album tracks on it, RIAA curve and all. Dire Straits Brothers in Arms still sounds pretty good - there's a reason it won two Grammys. Bought the MoFi remaster last year of it.
Wow.
I guess you could just put one speaker slightly further away from the listening position or something...
I agree that amps are not the best arena for innovation any more, and that audiophiles ("audio fools") are often emotionally invested in their particular choices, and covering it up with jargon and BS.
But moving away from amps -- speakers and room characteristics do still make a big difference. I do most listening on a decent system (mid-size Dynaudio speakers) but hearing their larger cousins in a shop with great source material is still a thrill.
(If you haven't seen it, Fred Kaplan's recent article on the topic of audiophilia is pretty good: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/02/audiop... -- he has written for Stereophile for many years.)
Now, people seem to be trying to get better fidelity than that of the original recording medium, which is obviously insane. You're listening past the art to examine details of the noise floor of 20th century equipment that weren't even detectable at the time. What on earth is the point of that? I mean it's one thing to do that to a Stockhausen record, but I don't think Miles would be terribly impressed.
There's a law of diminishing returns for this stuff, and after a very small amount of time and money you're going to be better off contemplating the music and not the sound, even if the sound still aint great. You can be sure that's what the composer was doing.
Beethoven was deaf for christ's sake!
By way of explanation, here is the preferred, "natural" signal chain for the music closest to my heart, UK rave music:
1. Source materials taken from old vinyl and put into a cheap sampler, often with only 12 bit resolution.
2. Recorded through a budget Mackie mixing desk, and bounced to DAT.
3. Pressed to a one-off acetate record (the analog version of a CDR)
4. Played through a cheap DJ mixer at a pirate radio station, and pushed through a rack of cheap compressors/limiters for broadcast.
5. Encoded as a microwave laser and beamed several miles to the actual transmitter, to obscure the location of the studio from the police.
6. Encoded again into FM and transmitted.
7. Picked up on a consumer radio and recorded to consumer cassette tape.
8. (Optional step) Said tape left in a box for 15 years under your older brother's bed.
Apart from step 8, this was largely how people listened to the music at the time. I have since obtained step 2 copies of music I had previously only heard at step 8, and all the emotion was gone. You could tell it had been shorn of context. So, as you can hopefully see, I find ideas of "fidelity" rather difficult.
When I and other young producers try and make records in this style, its a constant question as to how far we should go to imitate the sounds of all those dead media and ghost rituals. To me it feels pretty self defeating, but I still do it to an extent, because I think it sounds better. Sometimes I wonder what the modern day, internet-age equivalent is, and how to make it. I'm probably too old.
You're comparing apples to quantum dots.
Tape recording/mixing didn't add distortion in the same way that a bad amp adds distortiion. There certainly is such a thing as cheap transistor sound, and it's both measurable and audible.
There's also such a thing as a high-end studio equipment sound. It's why a good proportion of professional recording and mixing engineers prefer expensive outboard over plugins - even though some of the plug-ins are older than they are now.
There's also such a thing as amplifier sound. Pretty much anyone can hear the difference between a selection of affordable amps on a straight A/B comparison.
There's also such a thing as hifi wankery and outright scamming, especially in the accessories market and at the very high end.
But most people build/buy systems that help them enjoy the music more. If you can't hear the musical differences between - say - music played on a crappy cassette player from the 1980s and music played on a Nakamichi player from the same period, that's fine.
A lot of people could - including all my friends, in various store demos when I was helping them buy music hardware. Quite a few of them had the same reaction I did. Which was 'Wow, I had no idea.'
>If you just want to build high performance electronic equipment, there are much more interesting areas to work in than simply applying gain to a pair of AC signals while preserving their phase relationship.
But audio is completely fascinating because such tiny, subtle changes have such a big effect on the result, and often no one is exactly sure why.
Digital dither is such a small signal it should be completely inaudible. If you play a dither signal on its own, there's nothing to hear.
But the effects are very, very obvious.
Audio is like that all over. Tiny, supposedly trivial distortions change the quality of sound perception in unpredictable ways.
Some make the music sound more enjoyable, some make it sound worse. That's partly why people take an interest.
Competitive consumption is also a thing, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot up-to-mid-price buyers want something they can afford and enjoy. They're not seriously interested in showing it off to their friends or writing about it in hifi magazines.
Which is also deeply flawed, of course.
People in other comments have asked how modern class D amps perform. There are people doing a similar kind of thing with aggressively purist design craftsmanship, e.g. http://www.hypex.nl/technology/ucd.html - producing a similar nice flat Bode plot. The really cheap ones may be suspect and spew EMI everywhere, but if you're not quite so concerned with shaving pennies off the price they're perfectly acceptable.
The game rules are usually picked based on how much the player wants to put up with. His spec for low freq 3dB down is weirdly low to me because I don't own drivers that run that low (LOL) although the spec for 1dB down is probably more "audiophile relevant". I suppose as a design goal if a recording has a 5 hz signal I'd want it to be properly amplified for the speakers to turn into heat instead of sound, rather than clipping and making noisy harmonics every 5 or 10 hz up the band, so there is that justification, but, why not input filter instead of just making heat in the speaker crossover?
In this story, the game rules were use as little post-1970 components as possible while maxing out various specs to beyond human hearing. A good analogy for programmers would be writing a quicksort in BF or intercal. You don't do that because you need production code, you do that on a dare or to see if its possible or for the sheer heck of it.
Personally if I needed 50 or so watts I'd use a TI TPA3116 and call it good. There's kits available on ebay and elsewhere, its a stereotypical more than a couple watts less than a hundred watts modern class D amp. Simple design one chip no need for heatsink at lower power out. Does need 24V power and a heatsink for full power out. The chip costs about a buck. But that breaks the rules of the game because those didn't ship till maybe two or three years ago, not 1965.
This was written 12 years ago -- I wonder how the author feels now. Specifically I'm curious if the author is still contented with the equipment. Also, apropos of nothing save for sheer curiosity, I'm interested to know what input media (i.e., specific recordings and formats) and output equipment the author used (or uses) for both testing and pleasure.
It is wonderful that Kickstarter has removed much of the risk for people like this, that are obviously incredibly talented and have produced something great, but don't necessarily have the desire/risk-appetite to make it commercially without a proven market.
Also, I'd like to hear for myself how they both compare to the $20 solid state amps. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0049P6OTI/downandout...
One is a craftsmanship project hand built according to some peculiar rules (pre 1970s tech when possible, etc) and methodically designed to optimize performance and then tested to verify that performance.
The $30 amazon mass produced amp ships with a 1.5 amp power supply that was restickered to 2 amps (hope your fire insurance is paid up) and can't provide marketed power with the supply as provided anyway depending on speaker impedance connected and no one has any detailed performance stats so who knows how well it compares in all the parameters that matter. Also it runs about 1/10th the power of the tube amp. Finally it is a class D amp but the chip mfgr went all closed source on making a "special" D that got patented as "T", the "T" designator is merely marketing. Its a relatively early class D amp, I would assume modern class D amps would outperform it.
Note that both amps are antique in their own way, one is a "70s amp" and the other is a "turn of the century amp".
As a piece of art, one is roughly a highly talented semi-pro artist classic inspired painting, and the other is a walmart poster copy of a "Dale Earnhardt on black velvet" memorial mass produced kitsch, should be pretty obvious which is which.
I always found this design waaaay too complex. Some sections seem unnecessary while others don't make sense (but that's just me - and it doesn't help that the schematic is drawn a little convoluted). But I suppose it totally depends on his amp's application (e.g. playing records, studio monitors, live guitar, bass amp, etc), so it really may be the perfect amp ...for his specific application.
My thoughts... the power supply is a little too "verbose" for a tube amp -- just unnecessarily complex, and may actually remove some of the imperfections associated with that crispy "classic tube amp" sound. But I am a strong advocate of a well-designed power supply, so I can't say anything bad about it. But there's too much going on between phase-inverter and power amp stages (output drivers I presume). I would never do that, but to each their own. However, I do like that he used 6550s. Great tubes!
Also, what I miss most in the whole sound chain is that I can't change the volume of the tracks that existed before they were mixed into a single track. For example, making the volume of that trumpet in the background a little louder, etc.
I think it's a bit like why Gucci handbags are still so expensive. Because they are high end; there are people who are willing to spend that much, even if what I would call an engineer's assessment "do I get a reasonable bang for buck ratio" clearly answers NO. People by an experience, they buy a feeling. And it may be money well spent for them.