Cheap sonic upgrade

[Dmitry]

On 12/6/2020 at 9:08 AM, porcy62 said:

I strongly disagree, there is no ONE WAY to correctly design amplifiers, class A, class A/B, mosfets, vaccum tubes, transistors, ecc. The same performance on test bench doesn't implicate they sound the same. In order to "sound" they have to be hooked with speakers, preamplifier and one source. Sound is the result of an interaction.

I quote what I wrote in another thread:

"I think hifi is a system, like a car, that includes the room where it sounds. Consider one element alone would be like consider only engine or brakes or suspension to judge a car. Testing a single element is okay but it will not tell you exactly how it will sounds in your room hooked with your amp, speakers,etc. likewise the results of an engine on test bench will not tell you how it will works a car drives by you on a common road. I was lucky enough to test single gears in my system and often results surprised me."

I'm afraid it does.  I don't think car comparisons are needed. Electronics can be explained within its own parameters. If two amplifiers measure the same on the test bench, they will amplify the sound in the same way, regardless of their design. Just my $.02

[porcy62]

1 hour ago, Dmitry said:

I'm afraid it does.  I don't think car comparisons are needed. Electronics can be explained within its own parameters. If two amplifiers measure the same on the test bench, they will amplify the sound in the same way, regardless of their design. Just my $.02

Fair, I stand by my opinion.

[Dmitry]

1 hour ago, porcy62 said:

Fair, I stand by my opinion.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

2 hours ago, Dmitry said:

I'm afraid it does.  I don't think car comparisons are needed. Electronics can be explained within its own parameters. If two amplifiers measure the same on the test bench, they will amplify the sound in the same way, regardless of their design. Just my $.02

I am only guessing, but there has been a trend over the past 40 years or so, maybe stemming from Bob Carver's famous (infamous?) transfer curve challenge, that the complex impedance of a speaker's load will interact with an amplifier's output transformers to shape the sound. In other words, the sound you hear is the result of the amp/speaker combination and not just the amplifier itself. A bench typically uses fixed loads to test the amp.

I don't tend to agree with this interpretation because I don't believe that an audio amplifier outputs are that affected by the speaker's variable impedance, at least in an audible way. Audio amplifiers are designed to work with audio speakers and it seems to me that only a badly-designed amp would sound vastly different from speaker to speaker.