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Re: A well beat-up subject, yet questions remain

Posted by Paul Joppa (P) on December 11, 2006 at 09:40:04

In Reply to: A well beat-up subject, yet questions remain posted by bobbyj on December 10, 2006 at 11:35:33:

Most of these confusing points are over-interpretations of small bits of data. For example, Jeff Medwin found that when he replaced chokes and transformers in his amps with much larger units, his system sounded better to him. That's an actual fact. Extending that to claims like "it was the low resistance that made the difference" or "it would be the same with a different amplifier" is just a theory. Theories gain support when a sufficiently large variety of other experiments can eliminate the other possible theories. It's a legitimate reason for pursuing this in the forums - with enough enthusiasm, more experiments will be done and will get reported, and we will all learn more. But the fact is, actual controlled and useful experiments are a lot of work, while coming up with - and posting - alternate theories that might explain the few actual reported facts is easy. So the theories greatly outnumber the facts. To add to the confusion, we humans have a tendency to express our theories as if they were facts.

If you want real answers to the questions posed, you'll have to do the experiments. As you have observed, there are a great many opinions or speculations about what the answers might be. Once you give up the illusion that the answers are known, and accept that opinions and guesses are not facts, your design life becomes much less fraught with angst - at least, it works for me! :^)

I'd like to make a final observation which I find helpful to remember: amplifiers and their power supplies are a system - i.e. the combination is greater than either part by itself. Their interaction is complex, and the important parameters of one only make sense in the context of the other. You cannot simply dismiss the amplifier as a "load of such-and-such current" when designing a power supply, nor can you dismiss the power supply as a "low-impedance voltage source" when designing the amplifier.

Well, that's my humble opinion on the subject. Not a fact, just an opinion!

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