Do equipment stands have an impact on electronics?

 
ethan_winer
BTW folks (not you Ralph), I totally accept this is all my bad. I'm the atheist who ran into the church yelling, "There is no god!" :->)

Actually you're more like Chicken Little running around yelling, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"

But what that argument misses is whenever you have THD you also have IMD.

This statement is a bit misleading but is not false. The problem here is that there is often an idea that if you have high THD you must also have high IMD and that is the part that is not true. You can have low IMD figures and still have a fair amount of THD. I refer you to the specs of our amps on our website. THD is excellent for a zero feedback amp (0.5% is typical) while IMD is lower by an order of magnitude or more.

There are of course cases where IMD is higher, especially in older tube gear, but its important to understand how IMD arises, and IME that has a lot to do with power supplies which are a weakness in older tube gear (an exception being vintage Futterman OTLs which have very respectable distortion figures).

Since we felt that loop feedback was a poor option for reducing distortion (results in higher ordered harmonics), we avoided IMD by employing a separate power supply for our driver circuits, so that any perturbations in the output section could not affect the driver. We also reduced it by making sure that the timing constants in our power supplies were in fact lower than those of the amplifier circuit itself. Finally, we made sure that any fixed bias points could not be modulated by the audio signal itself. Vintage tube gear does not do these things (and also tends to have transformers...)! As well any solid state amp that is direct-coupled input to output is also at risk unless its powered by a battery. That is why battery-powered transistor amps tend to sound better (its hard to measure the difference in IMD in those cases, but the ear is well-known to be pretty sensitive to IMD as you know).

FWIW, IMD is really well-known to not be pleasant to the ear and is **not** the reason people prefer analog or tubes (which generally **are** pleasant to the human ear)! So right here your argument seems to fall apart, as you seem to be conflating IMD with THD. THD is its own issue, as you know transistor amps are pretty low in THD, but what they have of it happens to be highly audible and objectionable to the human ear. Yet about 95% of all analog recordings are done with solid state, so I’m still having a problem with the way your argument is stated. I think you are missing something.

’Clarity’ as in ’music less clear’ is not a spec on any bit of paper. Its something ***Subjective***. And I do agree that higher IMD impedes clarity as well as altering the tonality towards brightness (because the ear converts IMD to tonality as well).

As I have pointed out before, digital systems have a form of IMD known as ’inharmonic distortion’ as it is intermodulations unrelated to fundamental tones. I think you must not believe that it exists; I’m pretty sure that your response to that idea resulted in a post deletion. I could be wrong. But its a thing I’ve experienced myself with a simple sweep generator, so I know its real and I know it exists in modern digital gear too. I don’t really care whether its in playback or record- you can’t playback if you don’t record (that’s an existential thing....).

What I think you are missing here is what I have stated before- which is that if the ear is very sensitive to the distortion, that even if on the bench that distortion **seems** low by bench measurement standards such as you are accustomed, its still quite high! The industry still struggles to measure these distortions accurately as they tend to be ’buried in the noise’ which is often a convenient excuse while at the same time not accurate. Our testing needs to be more rigorous.

The proof of this is that tubes and vinyl are still very much around and not dependent in any way on the high end audio community. The year of least vinyl production was nearly 25 years ago!! There are now more manufacturers of tube equipment in the US than there was in 1958. Think about that- the market wants it, and its not likely because its distorted. You ask a kid (and I have many times as I play in a band and do local shows) why they prefer vinyl and they’ll tell you because it sounds better. That’s not someone preferring distortion- because the ear isn’t sensitive to the distortion that the bench measures so much as it far more sensitive to the types we struggle to measure! I am repeating myself because I’m trying to put this in several ways so you can understand what I’m trying to say and yet make it understandable for the layman.

ethan_winer
But if you’re serious about understanding audio, you’d do well to cancel your subscription to the audiophile magazines and join the AES instead.

But isn’t AES actually an anti audiophile organization? For example, how do they stand on audiophile cables? On aftermarket power cords? On aftermarket fuses? On wire directionality? On vibration isolation? On Schumann frequency generators? On the importance of absolute polarity? No need to answer. It’s a rhetorical question.

But isn’t AES actually an anti audiophile organization?

Seems to me Stanley Lipshitz first presented his formulae on creating RIAA EQ curves to the AES. They also have that File 48 (balanced line standard) I like to trot out.  Baby and the bathwater...

Ralph, the only reason my post was deleted was because I told you know who to you know what himself. It had nothing to do with your post.

Digital systems do have aliasing, and that's like IMD except one of the source frequencies is the sample rate. So you can get aliasing with only a single pure tone. I guess you could call is inharmonic distortion but I'd rather call it what it is: aliasing. In all modern (competent) converters, all such distortions are too soft to hear anyway, even when listening carefully. But it can be measured, proving once again that test gear beats ears every time. Not for establishing preference! But for reliably and repeatably assessing fidelity.