The Richard Clark "all amps sounds the same" test

And all cars drive the same, all toilet paper wipes the same, all wine tastes the same. If you can't hear/feel a difference, it doesn't bother me. Your test is a total waste of time IMO.

What's interersting to note here is that this is the same Richard Clark of car audio fame. I followed him back in the 80s from his Cadillac sedan deville to his Buick Grand National. Simply put, two of the best car audio systems I have ever heard, and better than many home systems.

But what I'm getting at is the fact that he chose expensive Alpine electronics for his show car. Surely if he believed all amplifiers working within their power bands sounded the same, he could have achieved the same results with, oh say, Pyramid (low level chinese made) amps instead. But all the stuff in his car from the head unit on back was pricey, boutique electronics. Anybody see what I'm saying?

Shakey

Yep i do. i've had two great alpine car systems, one of which would play a dave brubeck at carneguie hall cd so much better than my $3000 cd player into leak tl12+'s and stacked quad57's. go figure!

All amps do sound the same... underwater.

Douglas - great last post.

Atma - hadn't heard he refused to pay, would be interesting to see more on that, and who finally broke the test!! If it was a regular Joe, magazine reviewer, or just snobby audiophile like us :).

To the equipment switching issue: I know for a while Stereophile was using the Mark Levinson 320S for various comparisons because it has the ability to somehow level match per input, I don't know the exact details, but that wasn't a cheap pre at retail! (And one I strongly considered getting before getting a Supratek. And while I'm off topic the Joule Electra line pre looks amazing...) My understanding is that the guy has a recording engineering or electronics background and part of the thing per the link above is that he runs the amps under 2% THD, so for some on electrostatics that may be 60 db :), but just to say he has equipment to measure THD and all kinds of little doo-dads, and high quality switching stuff - but that is all conjecture as I haven't seen any of it. Completely agreed that how you switch will matter, and if sound is degraded - on earbuds CD ripped Flac and apple lossless sound the same, so agreed that if one part of the chain is low-level differences will be minimized.

To some comments just above about car audio - I have felt that some high end car audio has extremely good dynamics as far as comparing to home audio - that is one area where car audio does really well.

For people just reading to the end my personal conclusions is that you have to look at his constraints really really carefully. Under his constraints I think he might be right. But then if you look at his constraints and consider driving a large electrostatic speaker to concert levels, then his constraints take away some of the most imoprtant differences bewteen amps. I decided that I might very well fail his test between the Sherwood receiver I found that claims 4 ohms capability and was like $75 bucks and a Nelson Pass pure Class A 150-lb dual pair of monoblocks because under his test criteria we may not get over 55 db.

Part of his point is that amps do a particular thing, and he can eq all the 'warmth' and stuff like that out of them, he seems to think he knows precisely what an amp does and that it doesn't effect things like soundstage or some of the other 'qualities' that we ascribe to all audio equipment. He does agree that speakers, CD Players, etc., even pre-amps make a difference, but he is making a claim just about how amplifiers work, by degree from a scientific perspective, that they do one thing only, and that one thing shouldn't have an effect on some of the fuzzier criteria we ascribe to audio equipment - *and to which he does ascribe to other pieces in the chain*.

Also - everyone here - this makes me think that Parc may really be on to something. In Photography there are programs that can make digital images sort of look like various film emulsions like Velvia or Kodachrome (for those not in photograpy, films with very particular characteristics) - maybe Parc could add to its system a setting for 'mimic tube amp', 'mimic solid state amp', etc. As it is it allows for tons of adjustments that are sort of along the lines of what they guy here seems to be doing.

Parc is high quality analogue, and me with my supratek I'm not going digital pre anytime soon, but the other thing this makes me think of is some basically 99.9999% lossless Parc device embedded in a megabuck DAC/CD/digitalPre that does everything once in the digital domain and then *once* and once only goes from digital to analogue to the amp. Esoteric, EmmLabs, Meridian, Berkeley, Levinson etc. kind of companies, they could put out something like that.

Parc should 'lease' their technology for digital embedding in the total digital side just as chip companies like Burr Brown, etc. sells DAC chips to these companies and they would make money there and from the customization/consulting they do.

So one of the biggest conclusions I'm coming to from thinking through the Richard Clarke stuff is that Parc, and perhaps digital eq embedded early in the chain, might have a strong future in Audiophile land...