Tweakers' Asylum

RE: Does it really sound better?

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In Reply to: RE: Does it really sound better? posted by Neff on January 30, 2010 at 07:29:40

That's a reason measurements have to be part of the decision. They may not tell the whole truth but they can help make that decision. We need more measurements, not less.

An example - over 25 years ago a friend of mine picked a cartridge using only a frequency response cure and a 1 khz square wave saying he knew how it sounded. He was right. It was superb. It was a Technics moving magnet design.

Follow Ups:

RE: Does it really sound better? - ahendler 05:39:53 01/31/10 (1)
I have found that measurements tell you nothing about how a product will sound.Early transistor gear had fantastic measyrements and sounded awful. So did CD players. Tube amps tend to have poor measurements compared to transistor amps but many people like tube amps better.
Alan
- RE: Does it really sound better? - josh358 18:10:31 02/09/10 (0)
  Depends on the measurements. If you measure the wrong things, the measurements will be meaningless. Forex, tubes have more graceful overload characteristics than transistors and a less offensive spectrum of harmonic distortion. And back then, the importance of open loop performance wasn't understood. So you had transient distortion in solid state amps that used a lot of negative feedback to compensate for the high nonlinearity of transistors. So merely providing power and overall distortion figures won't give you an accurate indication of how a tube and transistor amp will compare sonically.
  
  OTOH, measure the right things, and the measurements will correlate with what you hear. If that weren't the case, it would be impossible to design things, you need technical understanding to improve a circuit or a device, need to know what parameters to try improving.

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