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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: RE: If something sounds terrible out of the box, whatever motivates to try and improve? It stands to reason if its posted by Tony Lauck on July 20, 2014 at 05:47:33:
This is actually a good example of what we audio designers have to do, IF we want to be ultimately successful. We can create a design on paper, then build a prototype that might measure very well or at least 'well enough'. However, we HAVE to listen to it, much like an audio reviewer would, or leave the listening to a trusted colleague with a track record of having 'good ears'.
With the first power amp that I helped design for Parasound, I left a lot of circuitry that I did not design myself, but it seemed to do the job that it was designed to do. I personally did NOT put it into my home hi fi system, as I was sure of my measurements, and I was afraid that I might damage my WATT-Puppy speakers, especially the tweeter. I SHOULD have taken it home and listened to it extensively.
We took the original design to Stereophile and we were fairly confident that everything would be OK, but it wasn't, so I was forced to redesign the input stage to something more radical than an IC. This IC was added, not to be directly part of the amp, but a convenient way to have switchable single ended or balanced input. I realized from the beginning that this was the ONLY IC in the reproduce chain, including any preamp that I had developed over the years, but I used the best one that met the criterion for use in this circuit. I even knew the IC designer as a colleague, so what could go wrong?
Well, I HAD to remove the IC, and then we did a number of small improvements, and we released it as a MK2 HCA-2200. This time it was successful, and we got a B rating, exactly where I thought it belonged at the time. It was an IMPORTANT lesson for me, but about 5 years later, I made the same mistake again, but this time my associates actually listened to the amp, after I measured it, and found it wanting. This ultimately led to better amps from Parasound, when we found and fixed the problems, once again.
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Follow Ups
- RE: If something sounds terrible out of the box, whatever motivates to try and improve? It stands to reason if its - john curl 09:47:13 07/20/14 (0)
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