Most transparent amp you've heard?

When Ken Stevens of CAT was asked by a resistor manufacturer what kind of flavor he wanted, his answer was that he wanted them to have the flavor of water. I think he meant that the sound of a piece of equipment should be like a chameleon so that issues of bass, soundstaging, imaging, dynamics, etc are a refelection of the recording, not an overlay on the recording. I think this is he definition of neutrality and transparency. I think the CAT was very transparent in this sense, and to an even greater degree the Atma-sphere amps, at least with my Merlins.

Hi guys, You want me to define what I mean by transparent. To me a transparent component is one that passes the signal with the least harm to the signal passing through it.

How do you know if one component is causing less harm than another? I guess that depends on what you consider harm.

What I'am after is a very low noise floor, low distortion but also musical amp. I have Innersound Kaya speakers and love how transparent they sound.

The amp I have now {Parasound Halo A21} is good enough for any normal human being, but you know how it is in this hobby we are always looking for better.

Sean

Sean, do you need more than 6-12 watts for those speakers? Do you know what the impedance is like across the spectrum?

Pubul57, Yes they require more power than that. From the Stereophile measurements the impedance on the panel starts above 50 Ohms at 1.6 Kohms and drops to 3.3 Ohms at 15 Kohms and continues down to .5 Ohms at 29 Kohms. JA also goes on to say that use of a classic tube amp would result in very rolled off highs.

Most transparent amp you've heard?

That's easy. The most transparent amps I've heard are from Atma-Sphere, whether the M-60, MA-1 or MA-2.

What does 'transparent' mean - or what do I mean when I use that term? In a somewhat serious way, I mean the absence of the sort of distortion caused by output transformers between the gain stage and speakers. More generally I'd say, more transparency means less distortion. A transparent amp will lend itself to neutrality, but I don't think 'neutral' fully sums up 'transparent', unless you simply consider the terms as tautological.

I think of 'neutrality' almost exclusively in terms of tone character. Apart from tonal neutrality, phase coherency is an important aspect of transparency. The inductive and capacitive character of wire can introduce a sort of temporal distortion or smearing that greatly influences transparency. (...and a transformer happens to be one of the places where you find a lot of wire.) I don't think of hysteresis loss as increasing distortion as much as reducing signal, which is more a reduction of information than a distortion. But semantic entanglements approach.

Discussions of amp transparency probably should not look solely at the amp itself, but need to consider the amp/speaker interface and amp/speaker interaction. A slightly different question might be: what is the most transparent amp/speaker combo you've heard?

Tim