Solid State Amplifier Advancements In A Decade

I think we are going backwards in audio solid state wise. The death of the discrete transistor is upon us. All the fabs that used to produce great discrete transistors are now owned by third tier players. Take Motorola, for example. Or Toshiba.

The proliferation of integrated circuits and operation amplifiers has killed the discrete transistor. Everyone waxes about John Curl and Nelson Pass, but most of their designs cannot be built today. At least not on a mass scale. Talk to John Curl about one of his later designs for Parasound, the JC3 phono pre-amp. He wanted to build it with discrete JFETs like his other designs, but was forced by Parasound management to use IC opamps because Parasound believed they could not get an adequate supply at a reasonable price.

There is no question that IC opamps allow simplification of circuit topography and lower costs. But at the cost of sound quality. Like the CD, we have given up quality for convenience in the solid state design or amplifiers.

Forget Class D ban imposed here then. Class D is where the real progress is in SS amps. I've owned gear for years and miss very few SS amps. My old Tandberg receiver at home and Nakamichi in teh car maybe. I'd probably own a tube amp by now if not for having tried Class D first.

Please forgive this trespass; perhaps the future of ss will be Class D:
either by D evelopment or D efault?

What about the capacitors in amps - have they improved in the latest decade (or more) with regard to sound quality/longevity?

Capacitors and or other electronic parts alone make no sound and therefore have no inherent sound quality.

Its how you put all the parts together in the design that results in "sound quality".

Some parts are better than others though and operate within a smaller tolerance range ie more accurately to spec as a group overall.

So a good designer these days has access to better parts (perhaps for lower cost than in the past) and if he does his thing well, voila, the result can be better sound/performance.

OR many may take it upon themsolves to replace parts with better parts which if done properly should produce better results to some degree overall. If you replace a part with a better quality one but it is not the right kind to start with, well anything can happen.

Experts in all fields tend to become better over time so no doubt in my mind there is more expertise in designing good gear out there today than ever before. That's called progress and is probably the biggest difference. Today's experts have the expertise of all those in the past to draw upon. They may still innovate but there is a better body of knowledge available for them to start with so the good ones will likely produce even better products. That's progress.....