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In Reply to: RE: You are consistently one of the most opinionated posters, with a long record posted by kuribo on December 08, 2014 at 06:10:44
Its so funny when people like you throw around words like "dogma" and don't even really understand what that means. Dogma is defined as the following:
"1.An authoritative principle, belief or statement of opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true regardless of evidence, or without evidence to support it. "
or
"2.A doctrine (or set of doctrines) relating to matters such as morality and faith, set forth authoritatively by a religious organization or leader. "
Now assuming you meant number 1, I would say that while I think I have done my research and based on my listening obsreavations have found correlation with different types of amp designs. These designs have been found to generate distortion in such a way that a number of studies would say that most listeners would prefer over the standard design orthodoxy. So, there is evidence to support my point of view and it is both observational and scietifically generated evidence.
Take papers by Cheever, Geddes and others as a basis for figuring out what kind of distortion sound better than others (there is no "good" distortion just more or less audible) and some attempts to numerically catagorize it (Shorter, Geddes, Cheever and others) and I have indeed come up with a list based on available measurements and amps that I have heard first hand. Keith Howard also found interesting things when he added distortion mathematically to music. He found undistorted sounded best; however, he found that the patterns that people like Jean Hiraga found the most pleasing were the least damaging to the recording. So, while no distortion is benign there is less damaging and more damaging.
Declaring which amps I have found to sound good and those I have not is not pontification, nor is it dogma...it is observational science (the foundation of all science is observation and then research into that observation). I am a scientist, more specifically, I am an analytical scientist...I make measurements and devise testing schemes for a living. Starting many years ago, I started listening to as many amps and preamps as possible and started to realise that I was leaning in a particular direction because of the sound I heard and how it compared to my experiences with live, unamplified music. I started to form a hypothesis about what constitutes good sound and started then to find research that has been done to support that hypothesis. I have found a number of papers that support what I am hearing but it is far from perfect science. That much is clear.
For amps I haven't heard I think at this point I can tell from the data if they COULD be interesting or not. Until I hear them for real it is not a fact only a possibility. The LAMMS on paper should be a possibilty but in practice I found that something bothered me about the sound.
In the end, I am sharing my findings, which you are free to accept or refuse but unlike most people I have a clear methodology for finding really good gear. If you think that is dogma then you are mistaken in your use of the word.
If you think my statement that I find Class D to not be good sounding as being dogmatic, well you are wrong again because I have owned three different types of Class D amps and tried many many others. I don't give up after the first listen. It is based on the OBSERVATION that all of the Class D amps I have heard don't deliver really good sound. Not at home, not in shops, not at shows, not at friend's...not!
We had the Devialet (original) in-house (widely considered to be the best Class D) and it was soundly beaten by other amps of more conventional design.
I have heard more Class AB SS amps than I can possibly remember, including flavors of the year, Halcro, Soulution, darTZeel, Vitus (not bad actually), Pass etc. etc. on many many different speaker systems... they have problems like one would expect if you read Cheever and others. Sonically they are missing realism.
I am always open to the POSSIBILITY that one of these Class D or Class AB with a lot of negative feedback will be the ONE, otherwise I wouldn't bother to even try them out anymore...that would be dogmatic...like DISBELIEVER and his views about tubes on this forum. I try them, they fail based on my observations. Based on this repretitiveness of experience my hypothesis mostly holds true. I have yet to hear a pure SS amp that I could live with for the long term. The closest was the Edge NL reference monoblocks but I didn't try to live with them so I don't know how they would fare.
When I say, "I don't care", I really mean it because I don't need your validation for me to decide if I am heading in the right direction or not...my ears and my scientific knowledge tell me that I am. I like to share what I find and I like to debate those who don't agree with me but usually they are like you who haven't a clue and can't offer anything meaningful in way of counter argument. I also don't care about my "readership", maybe I have some maybe not. People do drop me emails from time to time...
Obviously everyone has to listen for themselves...I won't spend your money for you but I am happy to guide those who I am quite sure want a better sound than they have. It is a never ending learning process for me as well but I am largely self-directed (although I have had my mentors along the way as well.) I ONLY decide to buy something based on what I have heard and not on other's opinions...so I take my own words to heart everytime. Only a very few items I have bought without hearing first stayed in my system for long.
Follow Ups:
what exactly "better sound" is and why do you think you are qualified to determine for others exactly what that is? What's next? Are you going to tell me what food I should like? Which beer is "best"?This is the issue I have with your ilk- you "know" what is "best" because you have "heard" it. The simple fact that there are many kinds of amp topologies, each with their proponents and detractors, should tell you something- that there is no "best". There is only personal preference. Yours is but one opinion in a sea of opinions. What is true for you is not true for everyone...So you have heard a boatload of amps. Your experience tells me nothing about them but rather everything about your subjective preferences.
In truth, your "observations" mean -0- when it comes to what others may like or dislike. You have made blanket statements here repeatedly about the "evils" of negative feedback, class d, etc. You have no evidence to support this, i.e., "dogma"- the simple fact is, there are intelligent, knowledgeable people who think you are full of it and their preference and ownership of amps that use large amounts of it are both evidence and proof to the contrary. Again, what is true for you is not true for everyone- all you offer up are subjective opinions which you like to tout as some universal truth based on "science". I don't need to read a paper on TIM or NF to know whether or not I like the sound of an audio system.
If you want to debate the objective performance, great. That is were science, fact, and logic apply. There is nothing scientifically significant in your observations; science, fact, logic, have nothing to do with personal preference; anyone that is married can verify that... You like to draw these grand conclusions and generalizations based on amp topologies and oversimplifications; you have heard THREE (3) class d amps and have made your pronouncement. Never mind there must be at least 20 or more discreet class d amp platforms on the market and an infinite number of system combinations possible- yes, some amps perform differently depending on the system they are used in...there is no universal correlation-see above.You state: "I like to debate those who don't agree with me but usually they are like you who haven't a clue and can't offer anything meaningful in way of counter argument"...You seem to have "opinion" and "argument" confused: an opinion does not necessarily have to be supportable or based on anything but one's own personal feelings. And this is ALL opinion...I think I am the best judge of my own tastes- you are the one without a clue in that regard. I wouldn't presume to debate the validity of your preferences with you. Your appeal to authority ("I have heard so many SS amps I lost count", etc. therefore I am an expert) is spurious.
And yes, def. 2 fits as well: you do seem to come across like a religious zealot or "authority", who has exclusive access to the one and only holy path to "better sound"...
I could care less what path you are on, much less if you are heading in the right direction, or not. It is nice to know that you only buy based on what you hear, not on other's opinions, yet one can't help but wonder why you would then presume to think that your opinions would mean more to others than what they hear...
Perhaps others are taken in by your "science" and impressed by the long list of amps you have heard. Maybe they also make purchasing decisions based on internet "expert"'s "truths". Too bad for them. I would like to hope that most have more common sense than to take someone else's word on what will sound "good" to them in their system.
try it! you know you want to!
Edits: 12/08/14 12/08/14 12/08/14 12/08/14
"what exactly "better sound" is and why do you think you are qualified to determine for others exactly what that is? What's next? Are you going to tell me what food I should like? Which beer is "best"? "
It's called psychoacoustics and in case you didn't know there are ways to find out what sounds most people like the best.
I haven't just heard it, I have been able to correlate it to a greater or lesser degree, with particular amplifier designs. It just so happens that these designs produce particular distortion patterns that are low in perceptible distortion not in absolute distortion. What I am telling you from my experience is that I find that there are scientific explaantions as to why some amps would be preferrable to others for the majority of listeners.
Objective performance based on an oscilloscope or FFT generator is meaningless in isolation. As an analytical scientist one is always trying to relate a measurement feature BACK to a real world phenomenon. This correlation is where the meaning lies not in the raw numbers. The problem is that engineers have for decades pursued numbers as the ends and not as the means to achieving good sound. They have misunderstood the purpose of measurements in their drive to achieve better numbers.
This was realized a long time ago by D.E.L. Shorter at the BBC and Norman Crowhurst who wrote about the problems that negative feedback causes in signal generation back in the 1950s. Otala later saw a problem with negative feedback loops and speaker interaction. I am not coming at this out of the fantasy blue sky. Other rather smart men laid the groundwork for this kind of thinking. Cheever put it together pretty nicely in his Master's Thesis.
The disconnect between what is heard and what is measured has also caused JA at Stereophile much consternation. When AD likes something a lot that measures rather poorly and MF gets caught that way too sometimes it makes JA wonder what is it that is going on. Geddes explored this in 2 AES papers and found that his new metric fit much better than THD + noise measurements, which if anything had a slight NEGATIVE correlation with sound quality!
"In truth, your "observations" mean -0- when it comes to what others may like or dislike. You have made blanket statements here repeatedly about the "evils" of negative feedback, class d, etc. You have no evidence to support this, i.e., "dogma"- the simple fact is, there are intelligent, knowledgeable people who think you are full of it and their preference and ownership of amps that use large amounts of it are both evidence and proof to the contrary"
I have given reference to evidence about these other technologies it is up to you to read and comprehend. Ownership of those other products is often based on other factors than sound quality...that is often the nature of human psychology.
I call it objective/subjective because while, yes it comes down to individual perception there are clear rules that govern what most of us perceive as "good sound" and they are related to how our ear/brain has evolved to understand soundwaves and harmonic patterns in nature. Screw with what nature produces and you run a high risk of an unpleasant sounding result. If you read Cheever, you will notice that it is also sound pressure level dependent and therefore the sensitivity and impedance of the speaker and how the amp reacts to that also matters.
This is objective, observational science and theory synthesized from studies to link the two. I may not have conducted these studies but I am trained and qualified to take their findings and extrapolate what it means with various types of amplifiers.
" you have heard THREE (3) class d amps and have made your pronouncement"
You have a SERIOUS reading comprehension problem. I said I OWNED 3 different Class D amps and have heard at length about a dozen others.
"Never mind there must be at least 20 or more discreet class d amp platforms"
Heard most of them, including the new N-core from Putseys. I have also heard at length exotica like the Sharp SX-200 and Tact Millenium (and their cheaper models too) as well as Lyngdorf, numerous B&O modules (Jeff Rowland, Bel Canto etc.), T-amps, Nuforce, Devialet, Hypex UcD (several DIY), N-core (mola mola), Zap pulse (my own), PS Audio (my own), other Sharp (my own) etc..
"I don't need to read a paper on TIM or NF to know whether or not I like the sound of an audio system."
And that is the problem. You, unlike me don't care WHY you prefer something. I go looking for the reason I like what I like and continually lean towards certain gear and away from other gear. As a scientist I am trained to investigate the root cause of an observation...you clearly are not trained to do this.
"Your appeal to authority ("I have heard so many SS amps I lost count", etc. therefore I am an expert) is spurious.
"
THis is NOT an appeal to authority. If I had said, "AD thinks all SS amps are crap so I they are crap" then THAT would be an appeal to authority (assuming we both agree AD is an authority on audio). I am giving my firsthand observation, something quite different.
"You seem to have "opinion" and "argument" confused: an opinion does not necessarily have to be supportable or based on anything but one's own personal feelings."
As I have said many times in the past (you obviously read only what you want to read and not the whole post), I have an observation and have found evidence to support what I am hearing (see comments above about research in psychoacoustics and distortion perception) and based on this information have synthesized a hypothesis about what I think should sound good and what I think would not sound good. I make arguments using research that some kinds of amps will be inherently less good sounding based on their designs and the subsequent distortions that those designs invariably produce.
"And yes, def. 2 fits as well: you do seem to come across like a religious zealot or "authority", who has exclusive access to the one and only holy path to "better sound"..."
No, as I have pointed out that I have used scientific observation along with documented research in the field of psychoacoustics...is it possible it is wrong? Probably not completely but I am sure it can be further tuned and improved. I have never appealed to any authority other than the research results from various sources but I let the data there speak.
"to think that your opinions would mean more to others than what they hear..."
People seem to like my advice once they try it...I have had numerous adopter of my system concepts, particularly electronics. Since that is a fact (I would be blind not to notice friends who copy my systems) then I have to assume I am offering some value from my advice. They take my word only as far as giving something a try...if it fits then they try to buy it if not...well then I guess what they hear differs from me.
"Perhaps others are taken in by your "science" "
I am sure you have no idea what is involved in practicing science so I will leave your comment as such. I have over 20 years as a practicing analytical scientist so I think I know a thing or two about scientific method and falsifiability of hypotheses.
Again, your science is flawed. Your "science" as to which topology is "best" may be accurate for you, and undoubtedly some others will agree, but not for all, probably not even for most. Each amp topology has its rabid supporters who will tell you their amp is the "best". Where a subjective factor is involved, there is no singular solution. If there was, there wouldn't be the plethora of products in the market. People can't even agree on whether or not cables, fuses, etc. have an effect, never mind which are "best". How many amps are on the market? 500? How many topologies and variations? Digital (NOS? Tube output? Which chip?)or vinyl? Surely if there was a "best", there wouldn't be as many options available nor would this question continue to be discussed. The simple reality is there is no consensus "best", only different. It is these differences in perception and taste that drive not only the audio market, but nearly every other consumer market.You consistently generalize and oversimplify: there is no one class a or class d topology but many. Lumping them all together is like saying a Honda is faster than a Chevy.
Amps make no sound. They transfer a signal with gain. Systems make sound. In light of the fact that an amp and its subsequent performance is dependent and subject to the system in which it is inserted, again, your theory fails.Personal preference is an individual choice with no right answer. Your pseudoscience falls short because unlike people's preferences, it is attempting to use logic and reason to analyze something that does not subscribe to the rules of logic and reason.
Even if MOST people agreed with your preferences, it does nothing to prove they are "right". Personal preferences are not subject to a democratic rule of the majority. Again, there is no right and wrong. Only different.
Best of luck with your delusion.
try it! you know you want to!
Edits: 12/09/14 12/09/14 12/09/14
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