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

hi @roger_paul 

I am utterly fascinated by what you have written. What you say is interesting insofar as comparatively I recall going to a talk by Nordost and Vertex cables when they explained that they looked at sonar technology in designing cables which has not been done before - likewise LAvardin make their designs to get rid of 'memory' in solid state circuits.
I look forward to how this develops and if you/colleagues will make such a design available for jo-public.

So Roger, have you quantified this axis then?

That is the question I asked before and got a long answer that seemed to contain neither yes or no. Have you quantified, do you have a spec for this circuit?

The spec for the velocity along the horizontal (time domain) axis = constant

Amplifiers that do not control this property are not constant (unstable) and as a result have varying degrees of smear or focus issues based on microscopic time warps.

Ok here is the answer to the age old question "why do tube amps sound better even though they have higher THD?"

Tube amps sound amazing because the velocity variations are minimized. I knew this back in 1969 when I use to design tube amps.
It is why they are still hard to beat.

But - they are still unstable. Removing the variations completely gives you an amp that has no sound of its own. IOW it does not sound like tubes or solid state.

It "sounds" like air.

I am not talking specifically about power amps. It applies to all circuitry, phono stages, line stages, and analog back ends in DACs.

This is why if you listen to older recordings made in an all vacuum tube studio using tube mic preamps, they are the most stunning captures.

I have understood the "magic" of tubes for years. I would have been happy to duplicate that "magic" using transistors. Most other designers have defaulted to the second best device - the almighty JFETs , MOSFETs which because of the field effect closely approximates the more linear grid control.

That's why the popular JFET craze is so well accepted. However, they too have time warp issues that need to go away in order to compete with air which is 100% linear and has zero distortion.