High-end amplifier clarification?

I prefer to look at measurements, scopes, and articles (I don't understand ALL the technical stuff but, thankfully, there are a lot of real smart people that do) about amps instead of dealing with reproduction of sound by some lame "musician"...a high end amp is simply a better and more expensive thing than otherwise, and putting music through it can only cause ear damage and incite sometimes shouted "opinions" from less worthy so-called "other people", and that can only lead to strife and discomfort. Art? I mean really...who cares?

Rshnicle,
Still trying to be funny?...still?

Still trying to impose "mirth control"? Still? I do have compassion for the humorless and feel for the long suffering friends and families of those unfortunate souls who are compelled to suck the air out of any attempt at levity by those who dare to joke around a little...perhaps looser underwear could help those without humor to seem less like my Uncle Dick.

Oops...I thought Roxy54 was aiming that comment at me...but it was at Rshnicle so I will allow it as Rshnicle's post wasn't as funny as mine, and apologize if I seemed harsh. Aren't I just a sweet person?

Weseixas, We did a few Stereophile shows but none of them were in '94. There may have been someone there using one of our amps though.

These days at home I use a speaker that is 16 ohms and goes to 20Hz. It uses field coil drivers with beryllium domes for the midrange drivers. There are no breakup in the speakers anywhere in the audio band, so they are quite smooth, very detailed and fast, owing to the fact that there is no magnetic sag in the magnetic field of the magnets- not unlike the way ESLs work. Clearly in its own way it expresses state of the art operation, even though it is not a low impedance planar or the like.

There are not a lot of published specs of our amps that are the result of independent measurement. One of the bigger problems we have run into is the fact that output of the amplifier floats, and so if the scope or analyzer used on the amp has a ground connection into the AC wall power, the result is that one of the speaker terminals will be at ground. This causes the amplifier to have high distortion and low power due to the resulting unequal drive of the power tubes in this condition. This was a problem with the Soundstage.com tests done about 10 years ago. In that test the amp only made about 100 watts- not the 140 that it did when we got the amp back from them and double-checked the results.

About nine years before that, an engineer in Salt Lake City sent us the results of a test that he did on one of our early MA-2s. That amp had a feedback switch that allowed that amp to run 8 db of feedback. The output impedance that resulted was under 0.5ohms. You can make a voltage source out of an OTL IOW, but to my ears it never sounded right when you engaged the feedback. I did notice that there were certain speakers that needed the feedback, but I found that if the speaker needed it- there was no way it would sound as good compared to a speaker that did not need the feedback.

That precipitated the investigation into the why of that matter, but I really did not feel comfortable in explaining the results of that investigation until about 5 years ago.