Audibility of Audio Power Amplifier Distortions
Reply #132 – 2014-12-03 14:28:24
tsk, tsk, Amir, another line taken out of context. You're incorrigible. In context of what's written *before and after*, that one-line answer makes a lot of sense. Cherry-picking is a form of cheating. That answer isn't meant to stand all by itself -- it comes after pages of explanation where the 'questioner' has been carefully led to a place of understanding. And it precedes the coup de grace that lays out , carefully qualified, conditions where audible difference likely does and does not manifest in amps. And it's simply ludicrous to claim it 'torpedoes any statement that amps sound the same'. In the case where two SS amps under comparison aren't being driven to distortion/stressed by speakers with 'strongly varying impedance curves',Meyer would say, quite correctly and confidently, that they will probably sound the same, with music, in a blind test. That's torpedo-proof. The problem is Steven, our esteemed member Arny, has proven that high-power solid state amps sound different:And the beauty part is: it's also a rather far more common case for any two random setups than, say, happening upon an SS amp vs a tube amp as the top halves of two biamped setup (the only situation here where *music* acted as a revealing probe signal ) "music" did not act as revealing probe signal. A couple of tracks picked at random by a tester does not constitute a proper test. If two amplifiers sound different on pink noise, they are different sounding. Period. End of discussion. This is not a place where one hides under that excuse. For pink noise to garner nearly 100% confident differences in double blind testing, as they did in Meyer's testing, one or both amps are deviating from anything that we would envision a linear amplifier to do: add gain without any colorations.