If i had the money.....

Once again Tok20000, one has to look at ALL the specs and know what they mean / how they are arrived at to know what to make of them.

As far as your comments go about damping factor, that is the ratio that compares the output impedance of the amplifier to the load impedance of the circuit. As such, one would have to run a LOT of speaker cable to drastically alter the load impedance that the amp sees. That, or use REALLY small gauge speaker cables. Otherwise, using twice the length of cable if using a "reasonable" gauge speaker cable ( like at least 16 or 14 gauge ) wouldn't make any "real" difference in damping factor at all.

As far as your comments about low THD and the "distortion wars" of yesteryear go, i agree. The designers sacrificed a lot of other important design criteria to concentrate on achieving good specs in the area of measurable distortions. They did this using high amounts of negative feedback. Having said that, if one knew about specs, you could look at the distortion measurements AND the amount of feedback used and draw conclusions by putting 2+2 together. It is not a matter of any one spec being more important than the other, but how the various specs affect each other and work as a whole.

Mr Crump: I had no idea as to what your email was talking about until i saw this thread. I kind of wondered how you ended up talking about the CD player project when we were discussing something else : ) Sean
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Cdc asked about a smaller amp and I told him what we had in mind as our next project....Parasound wanted a preamp, but think I have them convinced that the world didn't need another 3-4K preamp, but needed a really good CDP with some preamp functions.....

Bob,
It would be nice if they came out with a less expensive stereo amp for the people who can not afford $6000.00 for a pair of mono-blocks. We have enough pre-amps and CDP players now. You could also look at a intergrade amp also. Money is tight now being retired I know , I would really like to be able to afford the amps you made.

Tweety, in probably less than a year these amps will probably be on the used market for between $3k and $4k. So if you can wait until a magazine declares some new greatest flavors of the month, and people get a handle on the sound of these amps (and decide if it is or is not what they are looking for), you will probably be able to pick these up for a good price used.

Sean, great composers and musicians can see the music on a page, and instantly hear it in their heads. I do not have this talent. And I sure cannot look at any specs of an amp on a written page and translate them into the sound of an amplifier, especially how it will sound in my given system. Sean, if you can do this, more power to you. I cannot. To me, this makes specifications worthless. This does not even take into consideration the fact that the specifications may be WRONG or MISLEADING. This is knowlege that you are being fed by someone else, and many times it is the manufacturer. I am not going to say that all manufacturer specs are wrong or misleading, but as with ANY information put out by a manufacturer (of Hifi magazine), the specs must be taken with a grain of salt. This is much like audio reviews. Specs can be fudged, or made to look better than they really are (through omission) or even mislead by emphasize different things.

Anyway, the only thing I fully trust is my ear. And sometimes I ask for a second opinion from a friend's ear if I have a question or need to confirm something.

KF

On what Rcrump describes...

Yes, an integrative approach can also be applied to specs, i.e. seeing a greater whole through seeing the networking of the parts in action. Enough integration and you can develope an intuitiveness for seeing what is coming (a certain degree of prescience is what integrative knowledge gives you, which is only a further expansion of the temporal abilities that we already have; it has little to do with the parts themselves).

But, remember, Einstein said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality they are not certain, as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality."

The gear you choose is a reflection of a designer's active and receptive abilities, meaning that the sound produced, and how it may or may not catalyze your mind into deeper listening, is a finction of the designer's orientation. Attachment to the parts leads towards an analytic presentation; using the parts but transcending their attachment - seeing their future function in their integration, as Crump describes - leads to a different design and result upon the listener.

Specs is specs is specs, but you can't feel the warmth of the sun through a study of chromatics... It tells you alot ABOUT the sun (active mind), but it not the experience of the sun (receptive mind).