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RE: Nobody here ever said tubes don't need break in. (nt)

"I think there is sometimes a tendency to fantasise that things are more profound and complicated than they really are."

I disagree. THere is a tendency by engineers to oversimplify when things related to human perception are actually quite complicated.

"that have been overlooked by all the EE experts for decades"

Not overlooked but observed and disregarded because of the oversimplification tendency above.

"But maybe a home stereo amplifier really is just the rather simple piece of electronics that others say it is."

Simple, yes on the surface, but in the details not simple at all. I recently changed the power supply capacitors in my preamp...changed the sound significantly. I didn't measure though before and after to see if there was a measureable difference...maybe there was and maybe not.

"If those who speak of all these subtleties in audio reproduction were able to demonstrate in proper double-blind testing that they could actually hear the effects they claim to hear, then it might be more convincing."

I am a research scientist for a big Pharma company and I can tell you that double-blind is not a suitable test for audio. It is difficult enough to do these studies correctly with human biology let alone to do them correctly with human psychology. Messy doesn't begin to cover it. Perhaps this is what bothers the engineers so much because it is so easy to show repeatable measurements (I should know, analytics is my speciality) but how they relate is another story (we often have difficulty demonstrating In vivo/In Vitro correlation for drug dissolution...you think auido is easier???).

I am a MEASUREMENT scientist and have a lot of experience professionally measuring not only chemical responses with sensitive instrumentation also measuring the performance of the instruments themselves (I co-designed and built some highly sophisticated mass spectrometers). We use high precsion electronics on a daily basis. However, in the pharma industry it is difficult but required to demonstrate some kind of correlation between drug MEASUREMENTS and clinical behavior.

There have been some more recent attempts to correlate audible issues with measured types of distortions with some success. It should be noted that in those more recent attempts it did not come down in favor of the ultra low THD crowd.

Based on your comments it seems that you would favor rather than a SET (this is the SET forum you are commenting in afterall) but rather a ultra low THD SS amp...is that correct? Those are, afterall, "properly" designed based on "known" engineering principles and fully worked out theories, right? Some even measure, for the most part, below "audibility".

Trust me, as a scientist and part-time engineer, I would love to see amps with virtually "zero" distortion sound the best...it would fit with logic as far as the assumption is that non-linear devices can be forced into linearity. However, all is not quite as it seems and this is where the scientist in me takes over and tries to dig into the root causes of sound. This is where the "simplicity" of audio engineering veers away from the "tried and true" path obviously taught in school...it simply doesn't deliver the sonic goods!

Before you go off thinking I only like euphonic sounds and that realism is not what I seek I would refer you to some articles. One is by Keith Howard where he manipulated sound files by computer. He naturally found the unadulterated file to sound the best (this would be the theoretical perfect amplifier that doesn't exist) but he found that certain distortion patterns were far less objectionable than others. You can find the article in Stereophile.

Likewise, Cheever found that a distortion pattern that mimics what he defines as "Aural harmonics" at all levels (it is a level dependent metric...therefore also depends on the speaker attached) will be inaudible as it will be thoroughly masked by the listner's ear/brain mechanisms. Break with the pattern and bad things start to happen.


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