Why do audiophiles shun feedback in amplifiers?

Well there's a couple years of intense study in electronics engineering in a nutshell! I'm looking forward to a lot more analyses geared toward practical utility. Am I asking too much? Lets keep this ball rollin guys. Nice change. Is that a lyric?

Dracule1,
I don`t agree with the myth description.It just depends on the amplifier`s chosen output devices and the particular speaker being driven.What good is it to reduce 2nd order harmonics to extreme levels and then replace it with odd high order harmonic distortion(worse),that`s a bad trade off.A tiny amount of this NFB odd order distortion is not natural to human hearing and is processed as irritating and artificial.

Some speakers do require amplifiers with NFB. I`d prefer speakers designed that don`t 'need' these types of amplifiers in the first place.Amps without NFB sound more natural and realistic in my own experience, YMMV.
Regards,

It is not only 2nd harmonic, but also Intermodulation Distortion, Bandwidth, Output Impedance - practically everything. The key to avoid TIM is to limit bandwidth at the input to one that amp had before feedback (that extended bandwidth) was applied. This will be OK if amplifier had wide bandwidth to start with, otherwise reduced bandwidth will cause phase shift at higher frequencies and wrong summing of harmonics. Also, as I mentioned before, every amplifier has some form of NFB.

I don`t agree that 'every' amplifier has NFB. There are some DHT SET amplifiers that lack NFB in their circuit.Some of these types of tubes are linear enough so that it is`nt necessary.My amp is one example(unless Israel Blume told me a fib,and I doubt that).
Regards,

Charles1dad, It is possible but perhaps not very common. Everything depends on definition since even single unbypassed cathode resistor is NFB.