Can a Amp be "timeless" and compete with todays amps?

When @teo_audio writes positive feedback, does he really mean feed forward?

Technically (as in: labeled for least potential in confusion), feed forward, yes.

A lot of people try to meditate, exceptionally few make it to real enlightenment.

High end audio is no different.

Lots of people try to make it to the the peak of the best in audio..but... few recognize it and few, few make it, and few sell it.

Popularity of gear is the center of the bell curve, as.. it is, in all measure, a human bell curve. Where projections of what is best will be what they are, projections.

The first false peak, one might say. The one that all the heavy advertising is built out of.

The best selling brands are not the best, never have been - and never will be. It’s just life.

And, if one moves to the best in gear, it will be difficult to find, difficult to discern, and if one makes it there, no one will listen to them. Maybe ... not even understand what they say, at all.

Just like mediation and enlightenment, or any other endeavor that deals with a decently sized cross section of of people. A pattern emerges. One that repeats itself in all human endeavor and groupings.

Arthur Salvatore’s website (don’t even know if it exists, anymore), among others, covered this sort of issue or problem. This is specifically regarding your (the op’s) scenario. He said it, like (I paraphrase), ’the high end audio technician is your best friend. your most desirable friend. The most valuable person in audio, to you. As they alter the gear to sound as best it can, beyond the factory spec/parts, beyond the orignal spec. Not just repair of valued high end gear, but to upgrade it. The rarest technical beast/unicorn of all, the high end tech with an ear and can do good repair work. A talented one, would be one who understands what each and every single part does to the ’sound’ of a piece of gear. and they can then, with your desires in mind, go into the gear, and bring that to you - if it is possible to do so."

This is, essentially, the last stop in audio, the last leg of the journey, the last few step sup the hill of audio enlightenment. When i see people reject modified audio gear, out of hand, I think of how right that can be, but also how wrong it can be. It’s a complex affair to judge the competency of a good audio technician.

the next problem is the monkey. the monkey carrier, the one who wants to slip into the bushes on the savanna and have some semi-illicit sex with the young female monkeys. Where they are both supposed to be subservient to the top monkeys, and not do such things.

Then, foraging for food, a thing done for the self by the self. When this sort of instinctual paring/area gets into audio, we find that we want everything good, to be free, and work hard to find that opportunistic moment. So we want the best gear for the lowest price and we’ll wander far and expend lots of energy to try and get there, via that method. Just part of being ’human’.

This is some of this sort of stuff that is in the way of getting to the best in audio. Or, to circle back and ground it.,a bit... sending the gear in to have it modded out is a viable path to getting to better audio. In my mind, it is far better than buying new.

Depends on the expense, though. Does reputation (tied to popularity) allow for gouging in prices? Or is the work good for the prices involved? A point which is difficult for the lay person to understand. Recall that success(in it’s breadth) is for mediocrity, not pinnacles or peaks. To keep that in mind when reviewing situations. The coin to analyze has not just those two sides, but is multi-faceted.

All that be as it may, modding gear is the last stage in the last rungs of the ladder of high end audio.

Just about the norm for me. Simple answers are generally for buffoons, unless you find yourself running from a baboon.

Life is entirely non-specific, even if our wiring is designed to generally see it in black and white terms. The mind expands, the body narrows.

Black and white terms are things we force into existence, things that dissipate under the slightest touch or inquiry. As a mediator.... I’m sure you get that one...

And just to keep the lawyer jokes running (a bit of humor), here’s Jordan spending an hour saying that lawyers are entirely non-creative. (highly intelligent, sure but ....)

The issue with negative feedback is tied to the maligning of the micro aspects (in time and level) of transient leading edges.

Since our hearing is based upon this area of a signal, this means that, to overstate it a hair..that..100% of our hearing is in the 1-0.5% (and less) of the signal that negative feedback makes a total mess out of.

Linear measurement wise, this small error is meaningless, as mathematical ratios may go, in mathematical weighting and evaluation.

Which has pretty well SQUAT to do with how humans hear. (the given unweighted and disconnected mathematics)

Negative feedback is, generally, a solution to a problem that humans don’t really understand. at least in the idea of book learned electrical and electronic engineers of audio gear. We have to connect the problem and the solution together and that requires an intimate understanding of the problem. the problem, or question, is the REAL specifics the REAL internal meat and neural and cranial aspects of how humans hear, in the minute and total sum details.

Until then, these methods of making audio, like class D or negative feedback will continue to be the ill ought out abominations that they are. Like idiots on gobos and crutches, trying to run a world class 100 meter dash. Bad attempt, bad understanding, wrongheaded result of dubious value.. looks good on paper, though. works like a bear dancing.

bears don’t dance, they hit the sweet spot in our minds that sees the motions as being akin to dancing so we mentally place a dancing mental envelope of interpretation over the lurching about.

With bad audio we are dealing with the aural equivalent of Pareidolia getting in the way, where we create the shape of the signal in our minds, when it’s actual clarity is not truly there in the most perfect shape it could be. We are wired to fill in, via precognition of all our history in aural ingestion and interpretation.

THAT..is /class D and high negative feedback, in a nutshell.

Some of us can hear past it and recognize these inbuilt filters and correct for them. we can see waldo, aurally.

Some cannot or they feel they see waldo well enough that he’s actually there.

good audio reproduction allows a person to put the mental aural mind scrunching and efforts away, and just listen in a totally relaxed manner to the beauty of it all.

THIS is what Ralph is talking about when he talks about what the atmosphere amps are better at (and others are also better at)

Its the difference between an aware and thinking audiophile getting off on music. Or,on the other side, the linear mind side...getting off and solving a ’puzzle’ of signal recognition and interpretation, which is work. fun for some, but it’s work, hard work. hard, edgy screechy work, work upon a signal that is purposely damaged to make some aspects more aurally obvious, or separated from the whole.. And i hate that sound, like all sane thinking people should. It is horrible and anti-music.

Since we are all individuals with different learning curves, different libraries of internal data, and individual different & differentiated meat packages we are wrapped in...this is not a place where we can lay down a black and white law that covers all potentials.

Generally...the less a person understands all of this, the more the monkey inside senses danger (unknowns!), and henceforth desires a perfect black and white answer to these complexities. So, to self protect, it sits, claws out, in fighting positon..and lays a yes/no black/white beating down on the complexities it does not cognate or understand ...and lays down beatings on audio and music fans, fans that that tell them they’ve got it completely backward.

so, to overstate it slightly to edge enhance the visual on this so the general shape of it can be seen more clearly:

This is what partially encompasses my dislike, my honest and well thought out dislike of the premise and actions of the overall shaped thing called ASR. It’s deep premise is as dumb as a bag of hammers, it is missing the real argument and question, entirely. It is insistent on hanging witches, witches of it’s own creation, witches that don’t exist. It fails to understand the entirety of it’s own core question and answer set.

It also explains the haters and the detractors here on this forum.

No written word set is perfect nor entirely accurate, so don’t take it personally or seek to chase down some minor error in form or whatnot, in with I write here. That would only amply show everyone who is reading and can grok it all...one’s lack of understanding of the issue or the nature of functional discourse.

You're welcome.

Irony is a must, in all things that are observed in moderation.

Take..er.. your 'give and take', in it's norms. It's ambiguity, and shortness, for some, is designed from the ground up, to speak in ways of inflicted harm, via the least words possible. Trolling without seemingly being trolling. I see you.

Negative feedback does not work, in the final aspect of looking for perfection in it, in looking for perfection that is reasonably attainable (compared to other possible solutions).

Positive feedback might, if it is programmed correctly. A mighty big if, if there ever was one.

Problem is, that in an entire playback chain, that positive feedback aspect has to be carefully programmed. But some impossibilities remain, or at least seem impossible. Chaos/’infinite variation’ aspects, at least with our normal level of ability to unwind their complexities.

Negative feedback, one might say, is the simplified method of getting past those potentials in error within executing positive feedback. One that fails to take on the fundamental. Rather that it is ’clever’ and sidesteps it all, instead.

I did do a design where I combined negative feedback with a specifically shaped interference in the given amplified signal. It tends to sound like the best of both worlds. People remarked that they’d never heard anything like it before.

An example of this sort of area of thinking is found in Jim Strickland’s Accoustat TN amplifier circuit. It looks kinda dumb at first glance. The trick is that it is dynamically active.  It is transient wave shaping, in it's feedback effects, in the realm of time and level.

I did not cover the aspect of trailing layers of various odd ordered harmonic distortion patterns, as I try to take care of that when I'm messing with an amplifier execution, at the fundamental level. It is a huge part of the coloration, as Ralph says. But so is the other aspect that I speak of. Have to be careful, though, or we'll be delving into some thing about big boxes on cables and an infinity of poles of articulation.😉