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The edufication of Graham "Poopie" Stevenson
Poopie Stevenson says he came to RAT to learn. He won't learn anything
by abusing as morons the leading men, who've all done many times what Poopie is trying to learn to do,. Yet that is what Poopie has been doing for the four or five years since he arrived on RAT promising to be "on your arse". RAT, for those who don't know, is a thermionic tube/ valve conference. Since no one has yet told Poopie that the way to learn to do what we do is not by abusing us, let me be the first. But let us not just be negative, in the style of Poopie himself, or his fellow-traveller, Booger Krueger, or the late unlamented Stinko Pinkerton. Let us be positive. Let us offer Poopie the education he seeks. Now, the problem with Poopie, as with a lot of other diplomaed quarterwits who grandly style themselves "engineers" when they're really not very bright but very jumped-up technicians, is that they have without thought learned so many counterproductive tenets (that's a euphemism; the non-PC may read "prejudices") that they will never build a good tube amp (or a good anything) unless these deeply held beliefs, misrepresented by the diplomaed quarterwits as "facts", are broken down and deleted for ever. So, before Poopie can achieve his heart's desire of becoming a tube designeer, he must first agree to these truths, which he may find shocking: 1. THD doesn't predict whether an amplifier will sound right or not. THD is today a totally irrelevant parameter. 2. IMD, while theoretically a more useful parameter than THD, is still too coarse to predict the quality of an amplifier. 3. The damping factor (DF) really doesn't mean **** because speakers are too variable. 4. Ears, educated at live concerts, are better measuring instruments than anything B&K ever built. 5. Blind listening tests with qualified panels are the final arbiters of audio quality whereas instruments and normative assumptions (1-3 above -- a normative assumption is "what should be" rather than "what is") can never be the final arbiters. 6. NFB is not the answer. 7. Psychology is one of the answers. 7. Residual harmonics of 2HD are harmless up to half or three-quarters of one per cent. Third and higher harmonic distortion is destructive of quality sound even at minuscule fractions of one per cent. 8. There is no such thing as "SE sound". The so-called "SE sound" is made by Class A1 triodes operating with very little or zero negative feedback. It doesn't matter if those tubes are operated single-ended or in push-pull, and it doesn't matter whether they are real real triodes or triode-tied pentodes. It doesn't even matter particularly whether they are DHT; the distinctive, pleasing purity of that sound comes from Class A1 and the absence of third and higher harmonics which accompany the absence of NFB. 9. The loudspeaker is responsible for 95% of sound quality. 10. The best-sounding loudspeakers are point sources or faux point sources like fullrange horns and the Quad ESL63 and its successors. Multiple cones are the work of the devil. Once Poopie has mastered the first ten commandments, we can continue with the rest of his education. Andre Jute Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/ "wonderfully well written and reasoned information for the tube audio constructor" John Broskie TubeCAD & GlassWare "an unbelievably comprehensive web site containing vital gems of wisdom" Stuart Perry Hi-Fi News & Record Review |
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