"Robert Morein" wrote in message
...
I think what Audioguy meant to say is that audio amplification is
regarded as trivial not because it is, but because it is bereft of the
prestige that comes with working in a field with actively advancing
fundamentals.

If so, then I don't disagree.

I say to you, John, that nobody has come up with a reasonable set of
figures of merit. I still can't look at a set of your graphs and
predict how an amp will sound. That's a disconnect.

Unfortunately yes. But two excellent papers by Earl Geddes and his wife,
presented at the recent AES Convention, show a way forward, by looking at
how the spuriae produced by the "bent" transfer function of a typical
amplifier can be examined using a masking model representing human
perception. Their provisional results show excellent correlation between
the metric for a given amplifier and the audibility of its spuriae.

This work is not at the stage where someone could plug measured results
into a spreadsheet and out pops a "good" "moderate" "bad" judgment, but
eventually something like that will be possible. Of course, a human
reviewer will still be needed to produce what Tom Nosuaine calls the
"audio poetry." :-)

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile