[Audio Empire]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:54:30 -0700, Scott wrote
(in article ):


Sorry but I don't accept your rules on amplifiers. They may work for
you but they are not universal. I am quite happy with the euphonic
colorations I get from my amplifier (which is an amplifier whether
you like it or not). And I assure you that you can't duplicate those
euphonic colorations with tone controls or any other stock features
found on other amplifiers. You are free to like what you like but not
free to rewrite defenitions to suit your perosnal tastes and
prejudices.


Amplifiers can certainly be built (either purposely or not) to add euphonic
colorations to the sound. Speaker cables and interconnects can be built using
external components to act as fixed filters too in order to suppress some
portion of the audio spectrum to "enhance" some other portion. But just as
such cables are no longer merely conductors, euphonic amplifiers are no
longer proper amplifiers. An ideal amplifier is one that should, by the
standard definition found in almost any electronic engineering textbook,
increases the amplitude of any signal fed to it without adding or taking away
anything from the original signal.

IOW, whether you like euphonic colorations or not, euphonic colorations are
distortion, and distortion is something. ideally, to be avoided as much as
possible. Modern solid state amps have reduced distortion to vanishingly low
levels at practically all price points in audio. Without distortion and
without large frequency response aberrations, there is little to keep modern
amps from sounding pretty much alike, and in any of the DBTs to which I have
been privy, they do. That doesn't mean that there can't be and won't be SOME
differences, but it does mean that they are generally trivial (under normal
listening conditions) and difficult to hear even in a carefully set up DBT.