Thank you Tim,
I know most audiophiles would not make the connection between an amp with low distortion (.005%) and one with no distortion. On the surface you would think it would just sound a little better. Like taking out a little residual distortion that nobody would consider "noticeable".
That is not the case because there are types of distortion that don't show up on the THD analyzers. When those are removed the difference is day and night.
If you take as an example a live person on a stage and next to him you have a high quality first surface mirror setup so that you see the real person and a reflection of that person at the same time. As long as the mirror was completely stable - you may have a hard time distinguishing the real from the reflection. However if you simply press on the center of the mirror so as to produce a tiny bend or warp, it would be instantly apparent which is which. The instability of the mirror structure would cause objects that are far away to be even more unstable as the distance from the mirror would "amplify" the problem. The point is that it does not take much for your brain to recognize fake. This is why background objects in a performance are harder to resolve in a system with even tiny amounts of non-linearity. The farther away from the microphone - the smaller the signal size and the apparent location has drifted more then objects in the foreground or close to the mirror. .
Remember the carnival mirrors that made your head small and your legs long? - that is a non-linear mirror. It can be seen that the "small head" end of the mirror actually has (optically) compressed the image and the "long legs" end of the mirror has (optically) stretched the image.
The correlation fits the description of the Doppler effect. That is to say that a train headed toward you has the whistle pitch as higher (compressing the sound waves) and as it passes you (moving away) the whistle pitch drops (stretching the sound waves.)
Over the years I have claimed that Doppler is the destructive force in amplifiers. It is possible that an amplifier can alter the pitch of a signal with no moving parts.Removing Doppler from an amplifier forces its "reflection" to be true and now you are back to having a hard time telling if what you see (hear) is the real image or a reflection. The brain accepts either image as real. Whatever comes in the power amp will exit as a scaled clone with perfect pitch.
Roger
I know most audiophiles would not make the connection between an amp with low distortion (.005%) and one with no distortion. On the surface you would think it would just sound a little better. Like taking out a little residual distortion that nobody would consider "noticeable".
That is not the case because there are types of distortion that don't show up on the THD analyzers. When those are removed the difference is day and night.
If you take as an example a live person on a stage and next to him you have a high quality first surface mirror setup so that you see the real person and a reflection of that person at the same time. As long as the mirror was completely stable - you may have a hard time distinguishing the real from the reflection. However if you simply press on the center of the mirror so as to produce a tiny bend or warp, it would be instantly apparent which is which. The instability of the mirror structure would cause objects that are far away to be even more unstable as the distance from the mirror would "amplify" the problem. The point is that it does not take much for your brain to recognize fake. This is why background objects in a performance are harder to resolve in a system with even tiny amounts of non-linearity. The farther away from the microphone - the smaller the signal size and the apparent location has drifted more then objects in the foreground or close to the mirror. .
Remember the carnival mirrors that made your head small and your legs long? - that is a non-linear mirror. It can be seen that the "small head" end of the mirror actually has (optically) compressed the image and the "long legs" end of the mirror has (optically) stretched the image.
The correlation fits the description of the Doppler effect. That is to say that a train headed toward you has the whistle pitch as higher (compressing the sound waves) and as it passes you (moving away) the whistle pitch drops (stretching the sound waves.)
Over the years I have claimed that Doppler is the destructive force in amplifiers. It is possible that an amplifier can alter the pitch of a signal with no moving parts.Removing Doppler from an amplifier forces its "reflection" to be true and now you are back to having a hard time telling if what you see (hear) is the real image or a reflection. The brain accepts either image as real. Whatever comes in the power amp will exit as a scaled clone with perfect pitch.
Roger