Does anyone care to ask an amplifier designer a technical question? My door is open.
Hey, do you have a link to the complete review? I got 29 hits for Leben. A lot of mention for a poorly performing amplifier.https://www.stereophile.com/content/leben-cs300-integrated-amplifier-measurements JA does make mention of the ultrasonic resonance, but "maybe" because they're an advertiser, didn't make too big a deal of it. Cheers George |
John Lennon: "All I want is the truth, just give me some truth". Amen, brother! "High End" reviewers like Harry Pearson convinced lots of audiophiles that the measured performance of an amplifier and that amp’s sound are unrelated. That making a "good" sounding amp was more art than science. Yes, the race for as-low-as-possible static-measured distortion did lead to bad audio engineering, but good designers understand that, and perform bench tests that reveal the dynamic behavior of their designs. I can’t count the number of times I have heard an audiophile (or even hi-fi retailer), when presented with evidence of the poor engineering of a component the audiophile likes (or the retailer sells), or worse owns, defend that component by saying something like "Well, it’s the sound that matters". If a poor design, showing obvious performance weaknesses, sounds "good", something is very wrong somewhere. In the mid-80's I was in a hi-fi shop, and the owner was playing a system for a potential customer. I knew the following about that system's components: the tube pre-amp have a pretty high output impedance, and the interconnect cables very high capacitance, especially at the 30' length of the pair in use (from the pre at one end of the room to the mono power amps at the other). I couldn't stop myself from commenting that the combination of those two factors was obviously creating roll off starting at an audible frequency. The retailer responded by saying, you guessed it, "Well, it sounds good". It didn't to me, sounding, predictably, soft and dark. Cymbals were missing their brassiness and sheen, strings lacking life. I slowly learned some consumers, even "High End" ones, believe whatever they're told. The pre-amp was considered Class A, as was the interconnect. How could they not sound good together? |
If an amplifier is class A/B implementation does it not matter to mention the Class A bias i.e how many first watts are class A. Does crossover distortion matter?. If not why and if yes what do Class A/B designers do to make it go away or mitigate it. Generally reading around good Class A/B amps that have high bias seem to be well reviewed. Again interested to learn more about this. |
Keep in mind just because a unit has a XLR input that is no assurance that the input is balanced.A balanced input is no guarantee of better sonics. The devil is in the details. Every audiophile should read Bill Whitlock's AES paper "An Overview of Audio System Grounding and Interfacing" available here https://centralindianaaes.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/indy-aes-2012-seminar-w-notes-v1-0.pdf |
