What amps do Electrical Engineers own...why?

As an EE, I like good specs but at the same time I recognize that the way we humans perceive sound is something that cannot be ignored! So instead of going for the usual bench specs (which were mostly created 40-some years ago and mostly ignore human hearing rules) I look for that which might allow the gear to more closely obey human hearing rules.

Being pragmatic, I am of the opinion that if we did not have ears we would not mess with audio equipment. IOW, the human ear is the most important thing in audio. All too frequently though I see its requirements swept under the carpet in favor of the Emperor's New Clothes, the bench spec.

So I run tubes as much as I can. And no feedback, as much as I can. But I run into a lot of EEs that don't seem to understand how important the human hearing rules are; they seem to quite often have a $600 solid state amp that sounds terrible. You can be an EE and still be fooled by made-up stories!

Atmasphere,
Are you suggesting these EEs with bad sounding amplifiers can`t 'hear' that they`re bad or that they don`t care as long as the specs are good?How can anyone buy audio components(presumably to enjoy music) and not judge them based on how they sound? Or is what`s horrid to you may be good sound to them?

Honestly Charles1dad, it does indeed seem to me that many engineers do buy and listen on specs (although there are plenty of people who do that, not just engineers). I regard this as an example of how humans can run their lives around a made up story, in this case the story being 'this is what good sound must be like because this equipment has good specs'.

I think there is an education thing going on; that is to say that many people just never sort out how good things can really sound.

'Horrid' to me is usually 'bright' the kind of bright and harsh that forces me to leave the room to avoid a headache. IMO/IME, a stereo should not cause physical pain, but you know, to each his own :)

If we restrict the question to solid state amps, offhand I can't think of any having really poor specs that nevertheless provide top-notch sonics, but there are many renowned high quality amps whose THD and damping factor specs are not **as good** as those of many inexpensive mass market-oriented receivers and amplifiers.

Al, I think I know of an example, but its not a high-end amp, although it is highly regarded. The example is the old Sunn Concert Lead guitar amp. As a transistor amp its specs were terrible compared to the competition. But it was highly regarded because as a transistor amp it had a lot of the smoothness of tone that you otherwise only got from tubes.

The way the amp did it was to run an all-FET front end (preamp) that was zero feedback. Then the power amp was 2 single-ended gain stages that drove a transformer that did the phase splitter function for the output transistors.

As you can imagine, the primary distortion component was the 2nd harmonic. It made a lot of it! But that gave it a lusher sound that was lacking in its transistor competition (and still is), and so allowed Sunn to make a transistor amp the guitarists actually liked (most rock guitarists play tube amps because they have better sound).

IOM this is a good example of how topology influences distortion characteristics and also how that topology can thus interact with the human ear. IOW how an amp can sound better, and have terrible specs :)