Has anyone heard the new North American products preamp and amp?

I thank this can be narrowed down to a basic concept.

What is the difference between listening at the venue and listening at home?

At the concert hall the medium is air.
At home (from your speakers) to you is air.
The electrical "version" of sound waves is put between you and the venue that is handled by your gear.

The only way to remove the effects of your gear is to have it "act" as if it is also air. The way to do this is to make sure the your gear delivers the (musical information) to you at the same speed as it traveled through the air at the time of the recording.

You listen to the sound (re) created by your speakers at constant velocity.
By locking the speed through the amplifier as constant you have done two things.

1) It no longer can create harmonic distortion - because air does not.
2) Your ear-brain system now accepts what it hears as a clear (air only) path from performer to you. 

It cannot sound "live" without addressing the delivery speed.
This concept cannot be easier to grasp if you can see the damage caused by an unstable velocity in the mix.

If you treat the electronic section as a "bad" connection between the venue [air] and your listening room [air], It might make more sense.

Sound has two properties
Pressure - represented by the amplitude or magnitude (vertical axis)
Time - represented by the speed or velocity (horizontal axis)

Amplifiers get the [pressure] part of it down pretty well - but they don't get the [time] part of it due to distortion.

Slight errors in amplitude (pressure) are caused by slight errors in timing.
If you fix one - you have fixed both.

You need both to be correct if you want to feed your brain with the key attributes that make it "live".

The consensus generally is that harmonic distortion specs alone tell you little meaningful about the resulting sound.

This could not be truer - the problem is that the THD specs have not been taken far enough. In other words amplifiers may have suppressed harmonic distortion but that is not good enough if you expect it to be perceived as "live". It cannot have even small amounts - it has to be removed entirely.

Roger

"The way to do this is to make sure the your gear delivers the (musical information) to you at the same speed as it traveled through the air at the time of the recording."

If its just the amp we are talking about, the speed of the electric signal/wave it delivers as has been discussed prior is NOT the same as air no matter what happens in the amp prior.

So this statement makes no sense.

If we are talking about the speed of the sound coming out of the speaker, then yes because now we are talking about sound waves traveling through air again. But the amp has nothing to do with the speed of sound in air.   So again it does not compute.

I know how difficult it is to see what I'm talking about believe me - this is why it took years to figure out.

The electrical version of a sound wave has to include the complete phenomenon of the [wave] event. Other wise it can't possibly be expected to sound like (un-amplified) sound.

The electrical gear has to translate the sound wave (microphone) to another medium (amplifier) and transfer it back to air (from speakers) with no alterations.

Live is literally lost in translation.

Roger

cleeds, you and Mapman are obtuse. Where Roger's new amp differs is that all frequencies reach the drivers at the same time and thus the sound passing through the air to your ears is as it would be were you at the recording.

Since, however, there are other stages of amplification that are not corrected, there must be effects of these that are not corrected, but perhaps they are nowhere near those of amplifiers.

At any rate, what I am hearing exceeds even the good sounds of the Zanden suite at CES.