"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.


So long as Bob is giving you a basic rundown on what we call the
"objectivist" position here on RAHE, let me fill you in on one key aspect he
doesn't cover.

The *way* that objectivists determine their is no difference is through
double-blind a-b (preference) or a-b-x (difference) testing. The only
problem is, they have never verified that the tests themselves don't throw
the user into a different evaluative mode whereby the ear-brain construct
that turns sound into hearing musice doesn't lose track of what is going on
(in other words, loose a musical frame of reference as one would have when
doing ordinary evaluative testing.) The objectivists simply ignore this
inconvenient fact, and instead insist that since this type of testing is
used in other fields and in audiometric measurement (simple two-dimensional
signal testing), it has been proven.

Look at it this way:

1) Everybody who thinks amps or cd players sound somewhat different is wrong
and suffering from bias and delusion, or

2) the chosen testing methodology itself is flawed.

At this point there is no definitive evidence one way or the other...so move
forward but tread with care and don't ignore common sense.