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

" I have seen the future, I can't afford it"

not really

i suspect Ralph is right
There are plenty of frontiers to be pushed back

i do have much much respect for Nelson and he is a deep thinker and a doer - you don't always see those together.. my first real high end amp was his 400, probably should have kept it...

the pount about what people hear hear and how is critical, iMO critical to moving forward in a science based way vs opinion on flavors...

for example 30 years of work at Vandersteen on the importance of preserving time and phase and now MQA and the recognition of spatial blur and human sensitivity to blur vs the IMO previous holy grail of flat response.

a systems thinker might say MQA is no advance if you feed a cleaned up temporal signal into an amp with high levels of negative FB

so IMO expanding the frontier is more about alignment of design philosophy across the system vs just box obsession...

putting my $ where my ears are
ordered Vandersteen amps

some innovations:

built in power conditioning
built in HRS isolation
no digital chips in the analog control circuits
unique topology with 5 parts in signal Paton emitervresisters
liquid cooled
list goes on
and on

so yes innovation alive and well
and frankly IMO a very exciting time in Audio

I said it before on this thread and I very much feel this is where the big improvements will be made:

One area that is a problem for all amplifier designs is that most are designed to have specs that look good on paper and are not really designed to also sound good. Now this is a simple engineering problem (understanding the rules of human hearing and designing to those standards rather than the existing set of arbitrary rules); the bigger problem is tradition- the tradition of how we say what are good measurements and what are not is at the heart of the issue. How do you get the industry to move off of standards set in place 60 years ago??

Until we fix *that* problem, progress will only be had by the outliers who are willing to buck the tradition and pay the price. And they are out there.

IOW its simple engineering, but if we apply our engineering to making equipment that looks good on paper, but at the same time does not acknowledge how the human ear/brain system perceives sound, then we won't make any progress.  We have to overcome the traditions of decades to do that- most of the specs we revere on paper were developed in the 1960s and a lot has been learned about human physiology since then!

ok, now I'm curious - where can I read about the advances in understanding human hearing & perception (psych. not physiol.) thereof since the 1960s?

google
psychoacoustics
nih
ieee
etc

I even listed the signal and measurement requirements for a given measurement and its analysis to be comparable to what human hearing says the signal sounds like.

I did this in some posts, a few years back, in the blowtorch thread over at DIYAudio.

There were enough audio engineers in that thread that someone should have paid attention. I outlined the signal type, it's measurement or measurement weighting... and how this correlated to human hearing.

Not one word said in objection, utter silence. But that might have been a good thing, maybe some of them were listening. Then this equation: Proper question = proper answer.

On of the answers is that you can't get back the signal you pt in, each and very single part and wire that deals with signal is distortion/noise additive or obscuring in nature, an all done slower than the original delta in simplicity an complexity of signal. We are always in a reduced situation.

Which is why false detail swamped in distortions is the norm, which is why some have such trouble in discernment. And spending money in incorrect ways to try and pull out information that is not actually there. All we can do is make a slightly less rich and slightly darker copy of the original signal, nothing more. A chain of components and cables that makes things seem more open is exactly that, 'makes things seem'.

People don't want to hear the truth of the matter, they just want to noise shape their way into perceiving more detail.

Then play the game of shaping that noise and taming it, one cable or component chained with the next. fighting their way through balancing out slow dark fog and hyper etched screech. and the more you chain together the more it comes out as "thumpy screech". The end game of a system package acting as a loudness button slash transient modifier, all chock full of metallic originated noise. It can get very very bad in some systems. So bad I can't stand being in the same room.

Some audiophiles have become so connected to such gear and such intent, that you can't explain to them that they've pooched the idea of real dynamics without noise so badly ... that their $10-20-50-100k systems are a complete waste of time. so unmusical that it is actually painful to hear.