Are future improvements in Amp/PreAmps slowing to a crawl?

If you find outstanding (better than anything else on the market or ever mass produced) measured performance to be a meaningless achievement then how do you propose to measure what you find important? I would put it to you and everyone here that if you can’t measure performance then there is no way to track improvement.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem in the audiophile industry - it has become a fashion clothing industry that suits people’s tastes and follows trends with no goal to improve anything because "good enough" in clothing materials was achieved 30 years ago - so now it is about color and style in an endless circle of ever fluctuating fashionable trends.

Measurements and giving them high weighting, is the last refuge of people who don’t know anything and have no trust in who they are.

The negative side of that, is when the charlatan poses as the wise and tries to take advantage of those who don’t know anything...or is merely illiterate and does things that a charlatan might, in their ignorance. But it sells anyway, as the audience does not know any better.

...and the negative side of that, is when those who don’t know..deciding on how to be safe in the face of uncertainty... decides that all of them ---are charlatans. To throw them all down the same hole, when the gift of discrimination and intelligence in the given matter does not come to them.

Which kinda explains the nature of the divide and quandary we tend to drift into today.

You see it playing out on this board and all other audio boards -- thread, after thread, after thread, without relief.

To continue:

As long as we seek, this will continue, without abatement.

Any form of of screeching, hating, throwing insults or rocks about will change nothing. This sort of written communication is about reflection, not transference.

As long as the given person seeks and can stand the heat...their contribution, either negative or positive in nature, that response pattern will likely not ever change.

Until they do.

Some part of them will change and then they will likely leave these boards, never to return.

To be replaced by the next given mouthpiece with attitude, be that attitude/expression harsh or kind and helpful.

The wheel never changes -only the fool nailed to it.

goffkait

" I'm afraid they've run out of options trying to somehow improve upon the current model. More designers must think outside the box."

That's whats happening for sure. There is only so much tweaking you can do to a given amp or preamp design. You have to go outside the box to get new ideas to try. Unfortunately most designers have given up looking for that "new" circuit that will give them the best results possible.

I saw a video of Robert Harley (TAS) interviewing a panel of the top audio designers at an audio show in 2015. It was very interesting but the last question had a response that honestly I did not expect. He (Harley) asked them "Do you think we will ever be able to reproduce the live experience in music?"

The answer from all members on the panel was the same - "no". This tells me that these designers have hit a brick wall in their designs - sort of like writers block. 

This is why I felt it was necessary years ago to take a different approach. I needed to bypass that brick wall by simply using an entirely different approach. If you step back and take a look at the sound reproduction process and you had no idea where to begin - you have to boil it down to the least number of steps. First you want to capture the live acoustic event as performed in the hall.  Then you want to release or playback the copy into your listening room. If it is a perfect copy (like a clone) it will transfer all of the attributes of the original performance including the belief that the performance is happening now (live)

The problem is that the best you can experience, or record, is a subtle loss of transient function, so... likened to a master tape copy.. slightly darker, slightly duller, slightly slower. light recording has the same issues, or of a similar type of issue. the eye has limits, the ear has limits the recording mediums and devices have limits.

They would have to be entirely non interactive to suffer no loss. Quantum function in a mass aggregate classical analysis, ie a temporal medium says... that losses of some sort are the best we can do. Thermodynamics and quantum function in the interactive says losses are the best you can do. Brownian motion in the mass aggregate and interactive is part of it, one might conclude.

If you find it is the same or more detail than that, then it’s a lie, a falsification. (And we don’t need another aphex aural exciter)

This is how we end up with screechy systems that drive people out of the room, with their ’detail’. Cringeworthy audio systems, they can be.

The only way I found I could help, is to re-write the rules and methods of electrical transfer, so as to avoid the pitfalls of complex impedance in AC systems and how this signal or intelligence interacts with the solids, the lattice network solidus matter.

To go to a conductive fluid medium at the true molecular level, which acts more like a gas and less like a fluid, when subjected to transient functions or high delta. We get a response characteristic that is more like a gas/plasma medium under those transient functions of signal interaction. (delta as mass, or how a tiny bullet can explode a brick--as it’s moving very fast..kinetics also enter the foray. Very messy math. We can idealize it but we can’t really calculate it)

Thus the signal and carrier are more like ’one’ (plasma) which is as ideal as it will ever get, when it comes to removing the losses and masking inherent in complex impedance, how such damages signal. the point is that in a plasma, the impedance is dynamic and is of the signal itself. The metallic fluid at the molecular level and audio signals...takes you there... not all the way...but..enough.

It’s not perfect but it is a magnitude beyond wire.

The loss of the noise, signal slurring, and masking of complex impedance when it (signal) interacts with wire, this makes some think the fluid metal is ’dark’ sounding with no detail, when all it is doing... is losing the additive/subtractive noise aspect that people have lived with (fundamental to their entire idea of hearing and audio) since the very dawn of wire based electrical technology.

Other people..they report gobs and gobs of detail they never heard before, but with warmth and speed, unrivaled speed and dynamic attack. Ie, previously obscured harmonic complexity tied to transient function, both delivered clearly. Read any of the reports and they will all say these exact things.

But it does not have the falsified detail that is inherent in all wire - which has inherent complex LCR issues in the transient domain (high delta).

We humans hear by transient function.... so this matters, this is everything, the whole enchilada.

This is about a reset at the base level of audio and how we’ve learned to hear. Some get it, some don’t.

A tough haul under the best of conditions and mindsets.