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RE: You are consistently one of the most opinionated posters, with a long record

Posted by morricab (S) on December 8, 2014 at 07:02:21

In Reply to: You are consistently one of the most opinionated posters, with a long record posted by kuribo on December 8, 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.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

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