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High End Myth Glossary.

Disclaimer:
Many of the glossary terms bellow are entered with little or no comments. Large comments might require large space and time investment. If anyone reading this glossary is offended, than I'll keep you a company as well. Every myth-paragraph bellow adds a price to the audiocomponent only without substantial improvements and "upgrades" to your system.

Feel free to add to the list bellow:

1. Cables' price should be arround 10...20% of the whole system i.e if the system costs $100k than $10...20k should be for interconnects and speaker cables.

2. Directional signal cables.

3. Zero Negative Feedback.

4. $10k 10Wpc amps.

5. No need for larger output power. Place compact system speaker into the plywood horn enclosure and use SET 1W/ch.

6. Tube watts v.s. SS watts.

7. CD-players or digital separates over $1.5k(Analogue sources stay somewhere next to but not to the same degree for example $10k cartridges)

8. Audiable differences in .3dB or in .5%THD v.s. .001%THD.

9. Auditioning of audio furniture.

10. Stereophile or other oriented magazines one-person "expert reviews"

11. $5000 Mark Levinson amp looks like it should sound excellent...

12. $12k CD-player reads CD with greater precision.

13. tubes $900/matched pr

14. amp stands $600/pr.

15. microphonic-free chasis, power interconnects and speaker wires. tubes and transistors can certainly be added as well.

16. wire reactance influence on audio freequencies.

17. Nirvana speaker wire has substantially less reactance than Home Depot.

18. S/N ratings of CD-player(larger than CD's dynamic range 16bit = only 60dB!)

P.S. I would be also glad to see Worst-of section in forums here.
128x128marakanetz
themadmilkman
182 posts
 
I've had feedback explained to me well enough, but here is my real question.

I'm a fan of BAT's solid state amps. They are balanced, no-feedback designs. I understand the need for negative feedback with tubes and op-amps, but what about with a MOSFET based amplifier?

Just curious to hear your response.

BTW-- I also prefer speakers with stable impedances, which lessens the swings caused by the high output impedances typical of zero-feedback designs.
marakanetz's avatar
marakanetz OP
5,473 posts
 
I know well that VK was originally an SS amp designer(as well as Vladimir Lamm or previousley Vladimir Shushurin).

MOSFET as well as Bipolar or OP-Amp do need feedback. The mentioned BAT amp has probably Zero global neg. feedback while having plenty of local one. A local feedback is the one that is being applied to an individual amplification stage of an amplifier. A global feedback is being applied to the amplifier as whole.

When amplier is being designed and tested for distortions the engineer may or maynot need an additional feedback to correct them and this feedback would likely go arround the wole amplifier instead of recalculating and retesting values for every individual stage. Increasing a global negative feedback do decrease the gain and the output power of the amplifier substantially.
themadmilkman
182 posts
 
You know, I had always wondered that... As a marketing major (recent grad) I always saw a hole in the statements with the local feedback as opposed to global feedback-- there just weren't any designers that I could ask. I simply assumed that a no-feedback design referred to both, due to a lack of better information.

I will be sure to state that I prefer "Zero Global Feedback" designs from now on. Thanks for the heads-up.
marakanetz's avatar
marakanetz OP
5,473 posts
 
Themadmilkman,
Why d'u think many audiophiles love to have active preamp v.s. passive?

The answer is due to extra feedback to feed more linear signal onto the amp.
papertrail
186 posts
 
Rex, Corollary #2--If I can hear the difference and you can't, there must be something wrong with your hearing.

If it costs more, it must sound better.
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