Tube DIY Asylum Do It Yourself (DIY) paradise for tube and SET project builders.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Tube DIY Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

RE: SE 2A3 biasing : non-linear vs. linear biasing ...graphs

Posted by dave slagle (M) on March 30, 2014 at 16:18:58

In Reply to: RE: SE 2A3 biasing : non-linear vs. linear biasing ...graphs posted by Tre' on March 30, 2014 at 14:19:24:

This may all be a matter of semantics but the goal is objective. To Reproduce the source.

No that is your subjective goal. If you want to only converse with people who have the exact same goal then you are fine. However a community like this is filled with all kinds of people with all kinds of goals. My goal is an illusion of what I think the live event might have been like. I have yet to find any measurements that tell me I am going to get with a system but I have found specific patterns of things that put me in the direction I like.

We just don't have an objective way to determine if that's being accomplished.

Agreed.... but then why do we still insist on justifying the subjective with facts?

We are left with our subjective senses to try to ascertain if the objective goal is being reached.

Isn't the "objective goal" different for everyone? doesn't that simply mean it is subjective? I like hip hop and rap (old skool) and never really got into metal. Many out there don't consider either to me music at all.

This is why it's so important to educate our ears as to the sound of acoustic instruments.

I don't buy this. If you want to set the goal to be acoustic music so be it. To insist this is some kind of goal or standard is fine for the people who listen to that particular type of music. To suggest that if a system does this well it will also handle everything else is a bit of a stretch.

"Using the objective is a slippery slope that can easily take you places you don't want to go. Just consider where chasing the objective goal of "low distortion" took us years ago. "

That was due to mis-guided science.

how do we know that we are not using mis-guided (or better selective) science today? I seriously question the use of the word Objective in relation to musical tastes or reproduction.

The real science shows us that the human ear interprets upper ordered harmonic distortion as more noticeable/objectionable than lower ordered harmonic distortion by a large margin.

Then there should be some magical distortion spectra that everyone agrees on. Hell the people here cannot agree on SE vs. PP The SE guys bark out about the higher odd harmonics and the PP guys talk molasses like 2nd order.

Years ago serious people purposed that harmonic distortion be weighted to better represent the way the human ear interprets distortion WRT order.

so what is the right distortion spectra? PP or SE?

If that method would have been followed we would not have fallen into that rabbit hole.

sure we would have... it would have just been a different type of rabbit hole and don't forget there are many people still happily living in the rabbit hole you escaped.

Therefore THD is almost completely meaningless except, it is almost certain that if the THD is ultra low, it won't sound very good.

I see the lumping of all distortions together to be problematic but others may not. To boil it down to one specific spectra is right sure makes a lot of assumptions in my book.

The methods used to achieve low THD increase the number of upper ordered harmonic distortions. The result is the antithesis of the goal.

Doesn't PP decrease the total THD at the cost of high order harmonics?

re: crowhurst

measurements and theory are fine but the fact that everyone likes something different sort of makes them meaningless to anyone who doesn't hold your identical subjective tastes.

dave

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

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---