Dear @holmz : What you and other technical oriented gentlemans posted here means that if we take the Sansui, the Halcro, the Benchmark and Devialet amps and we listen to all in the same system and even that those four amps are way different whole designs using way different active/passive parts/board material/layout and the like we will listen no difference in the room/system quality performance. Rigth? I know that no one has Zero distortions but all are just really near of that.
I think we would need to A/B those four to make a determination.
As you lead with, “Other technically oriented gentlemen…” then I think in my case that searching for some musical nirvana is an endless game. I am leaning more towards accuracy in signal quality.
Now if the speaker load was purely resistive then a cogent argument might be to choose the lowest distortion amp.
If one has the capability to determine the distortion after the speaker, then the system with the lowest distortion (particularly in the 3rd harmonic and beyond, as well as IMD) would be closer to being high fidelity. Again I am more leaning toward fidelity over a musical flavour.
That said, however, I am running a tube stereo amp at the moment. Which does sound nice.
The gorilla is the speakers, their distortions and resonances, their sometimes difficult to drive loads. I am somewhat under the belief that the passive crossover much of the problem. If we got rid of that we might have less of a phase versus frequency dependency.
However we currently have this mishmash of amps and speakers where we need to find synergy. And this leads us to listening to determine what works. Ideally the speakers would be easy for the amps to drive.
Anyhow, at some point the experience is to listen to music. I have had pretty good results with my first amp (Class-A/B) it was a bit grainy but that might have been the recordings?
The monoblock tube amps that replaced the dead Class-AB were great when they worked.
The current Stereo tube amp sound nice, and I like it in Ultra-Linear versus Triode, which likely says I like harmonics? It does sound good though. (If I could keep the monoblocks working I woudl be using them still.)
I have heard a class-D Purifi powering some smaller speakers and that system was also pretty magical with 125 w/channel.
The whole analogue side is getting an upgrade. It was very nice sounding, and all of it was last millennium stuff. But I want to try low output cartridges and need more phono gain.
These all seem like first world problems, and other than the speakers and subs making huge differences, the rest of the gear, pre and amp(s), are usually more in the category of nuanced to me, than being super obvious.
