On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 15:38:17 -0400, "Robert Morein"
wrote:


"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Robert Morein" wrote in message


"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

The frontiers of high quality audio relate to personal audio and
mobile audio, which is practically speaking digital and solid state
to its core. This tubes and vinyl stuff is strictly a boomer thing,
and boomers are quickly approaching the age where their interest in
audio falls off because their ears no longer work so well.

Commercially, that is true.

Thank you.

But the absolute frontier of quality is in extremely low distortion,
massively constructed solid state amplifiers for home use, some of
which have innovative construction, or extreme attention to detail --
such as:

active constant current sources where others would use a resistor and
a voltage drop
heavily shielded chassis
distributed capacitance
regulated power supplies
and
low hysteresis drivers, with composite diaphragms vetted by laser
inferometry and
upsampling DACs, which allow construction of low pass filters with
less phase shift

This is a mixed bag of things, some of which are accepted practice, and
some
of which generally show up as tweaks that have no known audible benefits.
Interestingly enough, they all seem to pertain to power amps and
loudspeakers, neither of which relate to most personal audio.

True on the last point only, but I'm speaking in terms of the interests of
people on this group, who if measured by posts, have a greater interest in
uncompromised solutions.
My own answer to portable audio is a set of Koss ESP-950 phones. Yet even
these aren't quite as good as Stax Lambda Pros.

Try taking these on the train.

g
As far as the validity of the list, I stand by all of them.
The P3/a is a phenomenon