OK, I am starting to see your POV. But I will respectfully agree to
disagree. I remember many articles on this topic back when AUDIO Magazine
was around. ( I read that mag cover to cover every month! Sad to see it go
years back.)
I notice one of the conditions of the "test" is flat freq response in human
audio spectrum (20hz-20Khz). Most of the mid-fi components I swear sound
different...do. But that is because the output signal has some bumps and
dips at specific frequencies. That Onkyo I spoke of had a definite bump at
about 150Hz causing my normally flat NHT 2.5i's to give a James Taylor
concert some West Coast rap-like boom. That's what my wife noticed.
So I see the objectivist's point. Esp the psychological aspect. My only
hang up is: don't most amplifier designers put a sonic signature (aka: bumps
and dips in freq resp) on their designs? This would explain the glaring
differences when I inserted my brother's Adcom 545 into my normal Carver
TFM-15 setup.
Excellent debate.
"Bob Marcus" wrote in message
...
Oceans 2K wrote:
I'm new to this forum...I am having a tough time believing that there are
intelligent audiophiles who believe SS amplifiers all have same
subjective
sound.
Welcome. Yes, we're a pretty unusual bunch. To be a bit more precise, some
of us believe that most SS amps are indistinguishable when they are not
pushed beyond their capabilities. (Note that there are a few key
qualifiers
in that sentence.) And when amps do sound different, we expect there to be
a
straightforward engineering explanation for the difference (e.g., one amp
is
clipping, one amp's output impedance is high enough to affect frequency
response, etc.)
One thing you need to understand is what we mean by "sonically
indistinguishable." What we mean is that you cannot tell them apart when
you
don't know which one is which. There have been a number of experiments
that
show that people may perceive differences between amps, but when you cover
the amps so they don't know which is which, those differences disappear.
The theory (and there's a substantial body of research supporting this
theory) is that seeing that two things are different influences how you
hear
them. We've had raging debates about this, which you'll discover if you
hang
around long enough.
Note that we aren't saying that the amps are identical. We're saying that
the differences among them are so small that the human ear (which has its
limits as a test device) can't detect them. And we're saying that when you
hear two things that your ear really can't tell apart, you are liable to
hear them as different anyway, because you brain takes into account visual
and other information when it makes that "same-different" determination.
bob
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