Golden Earring wrote: > Afternoon all! > > Thought I'd chuck these opinions in to generate a bit of controversy > (just for fun, but... ) > > I would certainly expect a well designed piece of audio gear to exhibit > good laboratory-type measurements. > > However I remain sceptical that such measurements always reflect the > real world performance a music lover is seeking - let me give some > examples: > > Low Total Harmonic Distortion measurements are reassuring to a degree, > but most people find odd harmonic artifacts much more objectionable than > even harmonic ones (tube amplifier lovers seem to actually like a bit of > even harmonic intrusion to give a euphoric rather than clinical insight > into their recordings). I'm not advocating even harmonic distortion per > se, I'm just saying that of two pieces of kit with similar THD > measurements, the one with the higher odd harmonic components is likely > to sound less musical unless the designer has managed to get the overall > THD to a spectacularly low level. > >
Utter audiophile myth from start to finish. In fact all Harmonic Distortion of any order is a consequence of nonlinear amplitude response or curvature of the transfer function. Any transfer function that is curved will produce IM distortion if passing any signal that is composed of more than one tone, which is of critical importance for high fidelity since all natural music is composed of multiple concurrent tones. IM distortion is generally aharmonic, that is anything but harmonically related to the signal being amplified, and generally perceived by even those with the foggiest notion of high fidelity to be highly adverse to listening pleasure. To summarize, any audio component that has any amount of harmonic distortion of high or low orders produces as much if not more IM distortion which sounds ugly. So the statement "most people find odd harmonic artifacts much more objectionable than even harmonic ones " is totally false because in fact they find all harmonic artifacts to be objectionable because those artifacts can't help but also generate IM. Most tubed amplifiers that have acceptable sound are being operated at such low power levels that they really don't have much nonlinear distortion at all. The most commonly audible characteristics of tubed amplifiers trace back to their low damping factor. In the days when tubes were all we had, we put our most productive efforts into producing tubed amps with low nonlinear distortion and high damping factors. This tended to make tubed amplifiers more complex, heavier, and more expensive but in the case of such legendary brands as McIntosh good audible performance was obtained that way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ arnyk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64365 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
