First Worthless Wiecky twitched his net curtain to give us his worn-
out prissy-mouthed omnidirectional disapproval of everything outside
the narrowest norm of the lowest common denominator, a true janitor's
out-of-the-toilet, puckered bottom-up view of audio:
:
On Aug 10, 7:08 pm, "maxhifi" wrote:
There's quite a variety represented here - most foreign to me are the push
pull 845s, and the fact that speakers actually exist to make an SE 45
useful!
That "useful" is an exceedingly small universe, pretty much limited to
extremely efficient speakers and signal with a PA average of about
10dB or so and for those who wish to listen either to very limited
repertoire and/or at very low volume.
This is untrue.
Not to say that such do not exist, but that they are not particularly
adapted to the way that most of us use our systems in the real world.
So why say what you next admit is a lie, Worthless?
It is only a certain sort of person that can convince themselves that
90hz to 15,000hz down 6dB or more at anything outside those limits can
be mistaken for "full frequency".
This too is nonsense. What is true is that it is only a certain class
of fascist who believes he can prescribe what other people should use
and enjoy. As I've said before, Worthless, you are genetically, and by
your condition and ineradicable envy of your betters, a fascist.
Peter Wieck
Wyncote, PA
Sounds more like Salem in the days of Cotton Mather to me every time I
am unfortunate enough to see someone replying to your pompous
witterings.
Then Barry Bialos wrote:
An SE enthusiast faced with a limited choice of drivers is no less
prone than anybody else to mistake such a limited range for "full
frequency". And the real situation is not so dire.
Right. He doesn't need to make any such adaptation except by choice.
It is only fashion victims, parroting the latest street gossip, like
Worthless Wiecky, who haven't yet discovered that it is no problem
making an SE amp with audio range output, and powerful enough to drive
any speaker with any range you desire or prefer. I built 80W SE amps,
and we have an example right now of Patrick building 50-60W SE amps,
but the idiot Wiecky mutters on about low power being a necesary
condition of SE. The little janitor isn't only stupid, he's blind and
deaf as well.
What's more, if low power tubes sound sweetest, and some very sweet
tubes have very low power, all it takes to build or buy a horn that
will give full audio spectrum on vanishingly small power is money and
the balls to face down idiots who will say your horn is too big for
their houses -- then they needn't have it! It is absolutely no
technical problem building a full-range horn all the way down to 16Hz,
and a very modestly sized horn, as horns go, can easily with the aid
of woofer give 20Hz-22kHz. But people secure in their own taste have a
right to reserve to themselves alone the choice of balanced natural
sound, as distinct from the engineering wet dream of an arbitrarily
chosen "audio range". (Not even to mention that the idiots who decry
everyone else's choices on investigation are in 99 per cent of cases
discovered not to own speakers that can manage their wet dream, or
speakers even anywhere near as good are already owned by those they
decry. Or, to mention only the specifics of Worthless Wiecky's
stupidities, he is of an age when he has long since ceased to hear
that 15kHz he now jeers is too low for everyone else. Now watch the
outburst of rage when someone applies a modicum of logic to his
spiteful vomitings: the little man likes handing it out but he can't
take it.)
(We) are prone, however, to gerrymander our priorities to fit the
limitations of the gear, in order to receive a singular blessing.
And we have a perfect right to do so. However, as it happens, I love
chamber music and vocal music, including Gregorian Chant, and I choose
the gear accordingly. For some fascist mentality to come tell us that
we made a mistake in choosing our gear and are depriving us of
whatever his favourite music might be (you can spot the tenth-raters
on RAT easily -- they never speak of the rapture of music) is simply
intolerable. Hey, I have the money and the space and intellectual
ability, so I once built special speakers for Gregorian chant, but I
feel no need to apologize for them by saying that of course I also
have other speakers for more general purposes.
I've
built clean PP amps that were subjectively blameless, but always lacked
the ineffable qualities of "involvement" and "presentation" that even a
casual SE design would bring right back.
It's tough to design a really good PP amp because the mentality we
inherit -- as Worthless Wiecky has just demonstrated again -- is the
engineering paradigm of maximum power for minimum cost. Once you lose
that depressing burden, which only requires putting your mind in gear,
it becomes much easier to make a good PP amp. It should be built of
triodes or trioded pentodes (which sound quite as good as DHT if you
limit the operating range to the most linear part of the transfer),
and it should be strictly Class A and have zero or very little NFB
(which three things together make the sound that is mistaken called
"single-ended sound").
The strengths in each approach
are not mutually exclusive, and can be combined in the right
implementation, but I'm still getting there.
Hallelujah. Stick around Barry; we can do with another positive
outlook; sometimes it seems as if the congenitally negative creeps
like Worthless Wiecky are all that is on RAT, which is a view that
does an injustice to the many open-minded strivers after truth and
glee who contribute to or lurk on RAT.
So, the current fave 45 is suited to meet current real-world facts: my
modest SPL
requirement, a preference for small-ensemble music, an acceptable driver
on hand, and a willingness to take the narrow path through a deeper
experience than that which can be measured and quantified by pedestrian
means.
Nothing pedestrian about a banksa6550 PP amp with so much NFB that
ever-diminishing, of course, harmonics numbers must be given in
superscripts of magnitudes: "and the 513^10^3 harmonic is umpteen
thousand decibels below audibility..." A lot of topclass engineering
hours went into it and many are willing to pay for the bragging
rights. We should respect that too.
Horses for courses, as some living saint once said.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, and one will smell sweet. The trick is
knowing which one that is. A Class A ZNFB triode amp of very
conservative design coupled to high-sensitivity point source speakers
multiplies the audiophile's predictive abilities by at least two or
three magnitudes.
Regards,
Barry Bialos
Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
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