Home General Asylum

General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

Re: When does a better mouse trap turn distasteful carboncopy cloning?


The way I look at it is that the cicuit is so simple, how come no one think of it (or commercialise it) while the OP-amp is available for so long.

It's not that no one thought of it before. It had been thought of AND tried before. It's just that virtually everything the Gaincard embodies was rejected by the status quo as sounding inferior.

Monolithic integrated circuits sounded bad. Discrete circuits sounded better.

Global negative feedback sounded bad. Zero global negative feedback sounded better.

Lack of power supply bypass caps sounded bad. Adding power supply bypass caps sounded better. And bypassing the bypass caps sounded better still.

Tiny amounts of power supply filter capacitance sounded bad. Gobs power supply filter capacitance sounded better. And gobs more power supply filter capacitance sounded better still.

Cheap carbon film resistors sounded bad. Expensive metal films sounded better. And much more expensive bulk metal foils sounded better still.

Cheap stamped metal RCA jacks with God knows what sort of dielectric sounded bad. Solid machined RCA jacks with Teflon dielectric sounded better.

And so on.

So it's not as if the concepts that are embodied by the Gaincard are concepts that had been sitting around all these years wholly undiscovered awaiting some pioneering visionary like Junji Kimura. Rather, those concepts had already been tried and summarily rejected as being inferior.

And I'm not saying they are necessarily inferior as that is ultimately a subjective judgement. I'm simply saying that that's been the conventional wisdom of the high-end status quo (in the US at least) for several decades now.

From my perspective, I don't see the Gaincard's success being due to any sort of visionary thinking, but rather a pair of brass balls, timing, and marketing.

If you look at Mr. Kimura's bio, he started his own R&D in 1982. The op-amp approach is the result of his effort. He may have gone through trying different types of circuitry and decided on the op-amp approach.

According to Mr. Kimura, his choosing an opamp was ultimately a simple matter of convenience, not years of R&D. In fact, it was precisely to AVOID having to do any significant R&D. From his article in Audio Amigo Magazine:

When I first started designing a CD transport, I was hesitant to use a tube amp as its reference amplifier. I wanted to bring the sound of CD up to challenge that of LP, which, in my mind, was always associated with tube amplifiers. But to design a new solid-state from ground up requires totally dedicated attention and will divert my energy from designing the transport. Op-amps came in handy for my purpose at that moment.

In other words, his primary focus was designing a CD transport and in order to avoid taking too much attention away from that pursuit, he reached for some opamps because they're such simple devices to use and allowed him to put something together that would work with little hassle.

We can't denied his effort of bringing the op-amp approach to the audio's world attention.

What he did was bring attention to something that had already been tried and rejected by the status quo. He just happened to do it at a time when the pendulum of the status quo had reached its limit and began swinging back the other way. This was about same time many audiophiles had begun to reject their massive, high power solid state amplifiers and started embracing flea powered single-ended triode tube amps, which was another something that the status quo had already rejected decades before.

Just look at something like speaker cables. Some folks got the notion that speaker cables on the order of 18 gauge zip cord were too wimpy. So they moved up to 12 gauge and that started a mindset of bigger is better and before long, speaker cables were starting to approach the size of fire hoses. Now things are starting moving back in the opposite direction, with more and more feeling that smaller is better, significantly smaller even than the 18 gauge cables that had previously been rejected as being too small.

The part choice of the Gaincard may be cheap but its production cost may be high. Never underestimate the production cost of the chassis.

Sure. But neither should one grossly OVERestimate the production cost of the chassis.

I hope I'm not stepping over the line as far as AA's industry members rules are concerned, but it's the only way I can speak from direct experience. But the company I work for manufactures amplifiers in which the materials, machining, finishing and labeling costs for the chassis exceed that of the Gaincard and Power Humpty by a considerable margin, with the parts cost exceeding it by considerably more, yet retail for no more than the Gaincard.

This amplifier here for example:



Just one of the 32 output devices cost nearly as much as the chip used in the Gaincard. The circuit boards are all gold plated and hand stuffed and hand soldered (again, this is all done here in the US). The power supply is dual mono back to the AC line.

Retail price with a 50 point dealer markup is $3,250.

So I don't think anyone is underestimating the production cost of the Gaincard/Power Humpty chassis.

se





This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Signature Sound   [ Signature Sound Lounge ]


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • Re: When does a better mouse trap turn distasteful carboncopy cloning? - Steve Eddy 02:02:40 07/09/03 (0)


You can not post to an archived thread.