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RE: Dennis, you never answered the question.

"It looks like his advertising is directed to an audience that is getting stroked to care *NOTHING* about that 99.99999%. It studiously impugns anything but his stuff, using words that indeed have no real meaning, though they are designed to sound alarming. You're missing something! is a fine way to get a non-technical audiophile's attention it seems. His terminology panders to that non-technical back ground. They'll not have the means to understand it is a steaming pile of Marketing."

Coming at this as someone whose career has been in science, I have always been, and I remain, puzzled by the standpoint of the "extreme" audiophile community who seemingly believe that an SET amplifier is endowed with qualities beyond the understanding of science.

Looked at dispassionately, a typical SET amplifier has, as I understand it, some very obvious and almost unique characteristics, which are easily measurable by the humblest of modern equipment, which would lead one to expect that it would have some quite pronounced acoustic qualities (related to the high distortion, especially second harmonic, and perhaps a non-flat frequency response). Most people who listen to SETs seem to report that indeed they endow the music with certain very distinctive qualities.

What I have never understood is: Where is the surprise in all this? Isn't the SET amplifier giving rise to exactly the kind of qualities that one might expect, given the nature of the distortions that it displays when measured?

It is certainly interesting that the human ear and mind finds these particular kinds of distortion euphonious and pleasing. But once this experimentally-discoverable psycho-acoustic phenomenon has been understood, there is nothing remotely surprising about the fact that people can find that SETs sound nice.

What is perhaps more surprising, or more difficult to understand, is the psycho-social phenomenon of why some people will pay vast amounts of money to buy a piece of over-priced equipment that produces these particular acoustic effects, when the same thing could be achieved for far less money. The peddlers of these overpriced amplifiers seem to thrive by by presenting an assortment of pseudo-scientific "explanations" which, like the one that prompted this thread, are completely lacking in any real scientific basis. And, at the same time, a disdain for real science and an appeal to almost supernatural qualities of their products.


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