Are future improvements in Amp/PreAmps slowing to a crawl?

The Map is Not The Territory.

A wanky and side shifted statement might be that Class D is about solving a problem that no one in the world of high end audio was interested in asking.

Further... in the world of stately posturing (why back down when you can double down!): For me, an innovation has to exceed what I know, almost from the get go, not spend 20 years in the middle of a fistfight argument about barely equaling it. Like Digital vs analog.

Human spheres of communication and awareness/sharing, social grease, clannishness and so on. Marketing..being a thing that works..speaks to the eternal shame of some of humanity's complex integration(s).

Hey Ralph,

the liquid metal cable is all about re-writing the ground that electricity walks on. As fundamental a mental shift as can ever be. From the molecular and quantum levels, on up. Hardcore and real.

However, it’s a difficult thing for most people to understand has even taken place.

It’s a dancing bear that dances a lot like wire but is not even remotely the same. At all.

Can it do better than wire/solidus in it’s application in audio signals? Most definitely so. Can people relate to those changes and upturns in qualities they desire? (the human question is more complex than that, though)

Some do, some don’t. Top people in various fields ’get it’, immediately. Pundits on forums?... sometimes...not so much.

'The end of science' bit in the title is mostly journalistic license in designing a hook for the article.

Nelson speaks on some of this via:

The other fundamental thing—number 2—is that I am centrally aware that all this is just entertainment, mine and yours. The objective needs of amplifier users are largely solved on a practical level, and as [Marshall] McLuhan perceptively noted, when that happens, we turn our technology into art. For me, the art lies in making simple, unusual amplifiers that sound great and measure fairly well. They aren't for everyone, but if they appeal to even a narrow segment of audiophiles, I'm perfectly happy. I'm equally happy if they are reliable.
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/nelson-pass-circuit-topology-and-end-science#T473FqLttf7wgh1I.99

Thus not quite the end of science but an established science can head into being used in or as - art as commentary.

If you find outstanding (better than anything else on the market or ever mass produced) measured performance to be a meaningless achievement then how do you propose to measure what you find important? I would put it to you and everyone here that if you can’t measure performance then there is no way to track improvement.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem in the audiophile industry - it has become a fashion clothing industry that suits people’s tastes and follows trends with no goal to improve anything because "good enough" in clothing materials was achieved 30 years ago - so now it is about color and style in an endless circle of ever fluctuating fashionable trends.

Measurements and giving them high weighting, is the last refuge of people who don’t know anything and have no trust in who they are.

The negative side of that, is when the charlatan poses as the wise and tries to take advantage of those who don’t know anything...or is merely illiterate and does things that a charlatan might, in their ignorance. But it sells anyway, as the audience does not know any better.

...and the negative side of that, is when those who don’t know..deciding on how to be safe in the face of uncertainty... decides that all of them ---are charlatans. To throw them all down the same hole, when the gift of discrimination and intelligence in the given matter does not come to them.

Which kinda explains the nature of the divide and quandary we tend to drift into today.

You see it playing out on this board and all other audio boards -- thread, after thread, after thread, without relief.

To continue:

As long as we seek, this will continue, without abatement.

Any form of of screeching, hating, throwing insults or rocks about will change nothing. This sort of written communication is about reflection, not transference.

As long as the given person seeks and can stand the heat...their contribution, either negative or positive in nature, that response pattern will likely not ever change.

Until they do.

Some part of them will change and then they will likely leave these boards, never to return.

To be replaced by the next given mouthpiece with attitude, be that attitude/expression harsh or kind and helpful.

The wheel never changes -only the fool nailed to it.

The problem is that the best you can experience, or record, is a subtle loss of transient function, so... likened to a master tape copy.. slightly darker, slightly duller, slightly slower. light recording has the same issues, or of a similar type of issue. the eye has limits, the ear has limits the recording mediums and devices have limits.

They would have to be entirely non interactive to suffer no loss. Quantum function in a mass aggregate classical analysis, ie a temporal medium says... that losses of some sort are the best we can do. Thermodynamics and quantum function in the interactive says losses are the best you can do. Brownian motion in the mass aggregate and interactive is part of it, one might conclude.

If you find it is the same or more detail than that, then it’s a lie, a falsification. (And we don’t need another aphex aural exciter)

This is how we end up with screechy systems that drive people out of the room, with their ’detail’. Cringeworthy audio systems, they can be.

The only way I found I could help, is to re-write the rules and methods of electrical transfer, so as to avoid the pitfalls of complex impedance in AC systems and how this signal or intelligence interacts with the solids, the lattice network solidus matter.

To go to a conductive fluid medium at the true molecular level, which acts more like a gas and less like a fluid, when subjected to transient functions or high delta. We get a response characteristic that is more like a gas/plasma medium under those transient functions of signal interaction. (delta as mass, or how a tiny bullet can explode a brick--as it’s moving very fast..kinetics also enter the foray. Very messy math. We can idealize it but we can’t really calculate it)

Thus the signal and carrier are more like ’one’ (plasma) which is as ideal as it will ever get, when it comes to removing the losses and masking inherent in complex impedance, how such damages signal. the point is that in a plasma, the impedance is dynamic and is of the signal itself. The metallic fluid at the molecular level and audio signals...takes you there... not all the way...but..enough.

It’s not perfect but it is a magnitude beyond wire.

The loss of the noise, signal slurring, and masking of complex impedance when it (signal) interacts with wire, this makes some think the fluid metal is ’dark’ sounding with no detail, when all it is doing... is losing the additive/subtractive noise aspect that people have lived with (fundamental to their entire idea of hearing and audio) since the very dawn of wire based electrical technology.

Other people..they report gobs and gobs of detail they never heard before, but with warmth and speed, unrivaled speed and dynamic attack. Ie, previously obscured harmonic complexity tied to transient function, both delivered clearly. Read any of the reports and they will all say these exact things.

But it does not have the falsified detail that is inherent in all wire - which has inherent complex LCR issues in the transient domain (high delta).

We humans hear by transient function.... so this matters, this is everything, the whole enchilada.

This is about a reset at the base level of audio and how we’ve learned to hear. Some get it, some don’t.

A tough haul under the best of conditions and mindsets.

"As a bit of a tip: its probably not a good idea to talk about 'distortion-less' in the way that you do, it strains credulity."

~~~~~~~
Yes, straining credulity is my job. I hate it when people touch my stuff.

Its not that hard to design an amplifier that is absent the higher ordered harmonics. Such an amp will not use any loop feedback though, as feedback will add harmonic content and IMD of its own regardless of the left/right ’speed’ of the amp (as seen on an oscilloscope). See Norman Crowhurst.

Actually, I fixed that.

I have not yet published it, as I’m waiting to be able to produce an amplifier and sell it to people, before others grab it away and make it their own -to do their shtick of stealing other’s ideas and thunder. I showed it to a ~very~ well known amp designer and explained why/how it works, and he called it, and I quote: "f**king brilliant". I don’t design circuits, per se, but I do understand the overall complex physics in-situ, more than some might.

I even listed the signal and measurement requirements for a given measurement and its analysis to be comparable to what human hearing says the signal sounds like.

I did this in some posts, a few years back, in the blowtorch thread over at DIYAudio.

There were enough audio engineers in that thread that someone should have paid attention. I outlined the signal type, it's measurement or measurement weighting... and how this correlated to human hearing.

Not one word said in objection, utter silence. But that might have been a good thing, maybe some of them were listening. Then this equation: Proper question = proper answer.

On of the answers is that you can't get back the signal you pt in, each and very single part and wire that deals with signal is distortion/noise additive or obscuring in nature, an all done slower than the original delta in simplicity an complexity of signal. We are always in a reduced situation.

Which is why false detail swamped in distortions is the norm, which is why some have such trouble in discernment. And spending money in incorrect ways to try and pull out information that is not actually there. All we can do is make a slightly less rich and slightly darker copy of the original signal, nothing more. A chain of components and cables that makes things seem more open is exactly that, 'makes things seem'.

People don't want to hear the truth of the matter, they just want to noise shape their way into perceiving more detail.

Then play the game of shaping that noise and taming it, one cable or component chained with the next. fighting their way through balancing out slow dark fog and hyper etched screech. and the more you chain together the more it comes out as "thumpy screech". The end game of a system package acting as a loudness button slash transient modifier, all chock full of metallic originated noise. It can get very very bad in some systems. So bad I can't stand being in the same room.

Some audiophiles have become so connected to such gear and such intent, that you can't explain to them that they've pooched the idea of real dynamics without noise so badly ... that their $10-20-50-100k systems are a complete waste of time. so unmusical that it is actually painful to hear.

With all this and much more in mind....with the liquid metal wire, I went right after the fundamental carrier itself. I went after the complex impedance expression, right where it is created or interacts at the atomic level.

If you take strands of the liquid metal cable and make coils out of them and then play with pulse aspects, you will get some interesting differences that cannot take place with 'wire' coils. Fundamentally different.

Wire (solidus lattice organized elements and alloys) may be the best common carrier for electrical audio signals (complex ac expression) but it has it's issues. Complex LCR is tied to these aspects of atomic structure. Which we tend to try and ignore or not recognize as it has been here since the beginning of 'electricity'. We simply don't know any better.

Fundamentally different electrical expression is not snake oil, its just very very new and not really understood as of yet, with respect to written works that come from sussing things out.

Which is why I chase after the removal of all metals that have hysteresis issues, when involved in an audio signal. This delayed response tends to contribute to the harmonic structure of the end signal, smearing it across time and then being heard as 'loud' when it is merely obscuring metallic sounding distortions which are stretched in time.

audiophiles are so inured to this sonic aspect that they many times don't recognize a truly correctly delivered set of intermixed transients.

Or they do recognize the noise and employ gear or cables that swamp it with damping distortions, and dull the irritating aspects out. Then the next piece in the line of gear distorts and exacerbates the transient noise problem again and then the next cable or speaker or whatnot, blunts them.

They end up with a system that is built out of 'dulled screech' and then wonder why they keep changing gear out, over and over and over and getting to exactly zero fidelity.

There is no magic single bullet in any given system, there is only all pieces individually doing their best to not damage the signal--but more importantly, not add to it.

Yet we are wired to seek out this micro detail, due to our biological function.

It' a complex affair that requires some notable mental wrangling and retraining of hearing function.

Most people won't work on themselves, they project, as that is what ego does. With music we do so very much engage the wiring of survival and bodily procreation (music hits the same area of the brain as sex), thus we engage the blind side of the ego and it's projection.

Thus the audio arguments and intractable positions and the unending battle to have one's projection be the real one for all (ego demands that the world reflect). This is stuff is taken personally, all affront, all the time. Our balls are on the line. Literally. At least as far and mind and body are concerned.

Underneath this gigantic projected mess of an audio world, there is some basic truth but it tends to be the path less traveled. The best gear is known by less and less people while mediocrity has the lion's share of the sales. This is true in any commercial endeavor that has a large cross section of humanity's possible characters involved in it.

The problem that Geoff’s post proposes for some folks is that there is a tremendous amount of good scientific work to show where he’s coming from.

the idea that the ’problem’... as a stated set of words, is not so easily created and uttered. As a matter of fact, one’s intellect must rise to the complexity of the problem, it cannot be simplified down.

Quantum sciences are showing that we’re dealing with our own creation of reality, in the fundamental classical analysis context.

The studies, overall, done by thousands of competent researchers are all published and vetted. And then the meta studies on these given studies are also vetted and published. then gone over by the US Academy of Sciences.

Eg, the overall meta tests and the original works the meta tests were from, were gone over by the US academy of sciences..and this being true, it is stated as being true... with odds of being wrong in the 3 billion to one area of chance. Elon Musk, you might note, has also chimed in on this and has publicly and openly concluded that there is virtually zero chance (billions to one against) that we are in a matrix of a ’base reality’.

The end result is an overall ’scientific stamp of approval’, ie, overt factualization in the real world ---that we involve ourselves directly in creation of reality, from the dimensional to the real world.

Which takes the idea or thought of scientific objectivity and kills it dead, dead, dead. Objectivity is simply not possible. Ever. Never existed, and never will.

As this understanding begins to emerge in the masses..things will get hairy for a while. An understatement. the frantic flailing of a world’s ego sytem going down into a death spiral. Messy and ugly are understatements.

In the meantime, keep throwing those monkey punches and hay makers at the people who are trying to help you understand this mess.

What does this have to do with preamps? Well, in the end, quite a bit. This is issues of perception and discernment at the edges of science and thoughts on realities.

Most people here are operating 50 to 100 years or more in the past, in their day to day psychology and overall psychological basis.

I simply grabbed one single story from today, Oct 3, 2017. there will probably be at least a few more. Just for today.

Breaking the rules: Heavy chemical elements alter theory of quantum mechanics https://phys.org/news/2017-10-heavy-chemical-elements-theory-quantum.html


And that article in emergent science ’changes everything’. As stated, there’s likely a thousand more like it in just the past 5 years.

On average, people are woefully behind mentally. Somewhere in the freaking dark ages. Science is moving so fast right now....that it is changing nearly by the hour. I kid you not.

The esoteric is, by fundamental necessity...going mainstream. We’re still doing the hard science but what it is saying -- is purely esoteric.

I like to think that..More than anything....Nelson’s bits of screed on this subject is about avoiding the confrontational projected bias we are reading in this thread.

I refuse to make more than that -- about what he said in print.

To do one’s self a favor, imagine all the people who have contributed in this thread, are in a room with you.

To try and make one’s self behave accordingly. Only then does one put finger to keyboard.

(I can’t even use the word ’you’. Nor should I. It’s far too inflammatory. See what I mean?)

As for zero distortion electronics, not possible, all we can get to if done as well and as perfect as can be.... is a slightly slower slightly darker copy of the original. Imperceptibly darker and imperceptibly slower. Anything else is a lie.

You speak as if you are certain of this.
Its not possible (in your opinion) because......why?

uhhhmmm..the time/space 3d reality issue? The molecular energy transfer issue? Thermodynamics? Brownian motion?

I mean, is there any fathomable reason to state my argument from a 3d-timesapce reality standpoint, which is the arena we are operating in here (presumably)?

energy translation from one system to the next, is lossy.

No compensation system can fix that, it can only falsify.

a perfected system of electronic flow, translation, and representation, if perfected as much as can be...... is inherently lossy according to the rules or molecular fundamentals of it’s operation. A perfected system controls that lossy bit’s intrusion into the scenario, as much as is possible... and it ends up as stated. Slightly darker, slightly slower. imperceptibly so.

the problem is that... we can theorize that perfected slightly lossy system, but can’t really get there as the interference or integration problems with the fundamentals that create the distortions all have temporal constraints of one type or multiples of them. Temporal or phase related, they be.

As soon as you have two particles in proximity and in integration of some sort...instead of one particle on it’s own... this is your fate.

I hold these things to be self evident to the electronically and scientifically well trained who might find themselves in the world of audio.

Any other answer would be illiterate, ill informed, or purposely ’off’ for some given reason (openly stated or hidden).

An audiophile, will, of course (some, anyway), throw money at the first ill informed person who ’gives them more’ ..in the arena of more detail. Which is more usually more distortion of some sort. This is how we end up with entire swaths of gear that are incompatibly screechy, and we end up with systems that drive some right out of the given room. Each piece competing with the last to be ’more revealing’.

wizened audiophiles step away from that stuff and look to the item that is more revealing an at the same time more harmonically rich, more warm in complex textures, more subtle in those aspects. Not screechy overly detailed soundstages that only a madman would call musical. Real music is brash and potent,and unbelievably potent in the transient domain. But is almost never ’bright’, if it is a live acoustic instrument. Neither our brains, the musical instrument, or acoustics -is wired that way. Reproductions tend to fail in delivering these subtle time signatures and rich harmonics in micro/macro transient functions and smear those subtleties and get dark and obscuring and at the same time adds noise as an overly in everything it does. Inescapable phase issues and molecular noise. The reality gig pressing itself into the scenario -- an unavoidable carrier of the reality we know..

In the real world, you can stand beside a drum kit that is being played and have an actual conversation. that’s transients, and low distortion, large and wide dynamic range and noise floors. Live acoustic. Reproductions tend to utterly fail at this all important set of related functions. our systems (seldom heard but they have been to a few shows) can do this incredibly difficult set of tricks. Speakers with such low distortion in critical areas (as a set), that a speaker builder type guy borrowed a set, and blew a driver for the first time in his life. He never heard the limit coming. Not even a hint of any familiarity to hang his educated hearing on. One time we were playing a reggae record, with 126db transients. (simple 3 way- living room type space, treated) we sat at the coffee table in front of that....and talked. Not yelled, but talked. This was all approx 20 years ago. But I digress...we’re not ready to sell that to anyone, yet.