Why not horns?

"Julian Hirsch, Leonard Feldman, Rok2id :), Pete Azcel and about 99.99999999999% of all HUMANITY, both past and present, KNOW, that all amps sound the same. Meaning, if they are well made and engineered correctly, they have no 'sound'."

Hey Roks, no offense but don't you ever get tired of trying to convince a collective group that gather together to discuss their experiences with different audio products that they are just wrongheaded and that your light of absolute correct conciousness is going to somehow sway them to your belief system? Why do you do this and often relent to the pressures you are subject to endure? I really dig your appreciation of music but for the life of me wonder why a guy in the 99.99999999999% percent of humanity feels SO compelled to mandate the rest of us in see the errors of our experiences on a forum dedicated to this concept. BTW, when was the LAST time you compared different amplifiers in the past 5 years,(not to mention cables, I won't even bother to go there, we know, right?) Competent design indeed and indeed what do you mean by that aside from the electrical compatibility of a specific speaker to a specific amplifier aside from the room? I'll give you this, you ARE a persistent pest but I still love you man! I would however suggest you stay within that which you know unless you are willing to offer more than what you believe, your specific experiences maybe? Or is it all for your personal amusement? Inquiring minds really want to know :)

PS Why did I "go there". Well Roks, you and I have gone head to head before several years back yet you still adhere to the same balderdash yet have to date given not one example of your personal experiences. At least I havent't read it, maybe I'm mistaken. In any case, its all good, enjoy!

Who invented terminology to describe what we hear?

One more entry to dispel the myth that this was anyone associated with TAS, Stereophile, or any such magazine.

Below you will read the words and phrases "auditory perspective" (I think that word describes imaging enough to suffice as an equal substitute for "imaging"); "an illusion that causes the listener to seem to hear a specific sound from the point at which it originates" (sounds like another description that fully describes imaging and focus";
"audience in Washington had no difficulty in telling just where on the Philadelphia stage the brasses, tympani, bass viols, and so on were placed" (now we see the word "placed", so the concept of "placement" is introduced.

Folks, the proceeding article was in 1933!! I think we can see we did not need modern reviewers to introduce the concepts of imaging, placement, stage, illusion, and "auditory perspective."

1933!

Now the Article:
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NEW ELECTRICAL SYSTEM GIVES VAST TONE TO Full Orchestra on Empty Stage

Conductor, 150 Miles from Musicians, Controls Expression with Master Key

ORCHESTRAL music such as never before had been publicly heard, poured from the apparently empty stage of Constitution Hall, Washington, D. C, a few nights ago when Dr. Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, demonstrated before the National Academy of Sciences, a new electrical system of musical reproduction and transmission developed by engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

The source of the music was the stage of the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, 150 miles away. There the hundred musicians of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra played a program of standard orchestral numbers. In front of the Philadelphia stage stood three sensitive microphones, one in the center and one at each side. Each was connected separately by telephone lines with a loudspeaker that stood behind a sound-porous curtain on the stage in Washington.

In the rear of Constitution Hall sat Dr. Stokowski, before him a small oblong box, not unlike a midget radio receiver, with a front panel equipped with three dials and a pair of switches. Manipulating these devices, the conductor controlled the music of the far-away orchestra, hushing the sounds issuing from the loudspeakers until they were barely audible, and then making them swell to twenty times the volume produced by the actual orchestra.

At no time was there any suggestion of distortion, nor any hint, in the quality of the music, of the electrical transfer it had undergone. For the new apparatus (”microphones, amplifiers, electrical filters, transmission lines, and loudspeakers”reproduces with absolute fidelity all sounds that the normal human ear is capable of hearing.

Moreover, the location of the microphones in reference to the source of sound and the placing of each loudspeaker in a position that corresponds with that of the particular microphone with which it is connected brings about an effect that the Bell Telephone engineers call “auditory perspective,” that is, an illusion that causes the listener to seem to hear a specific sound from the point at which it originates. For example, the audience in Washington had no difficulty in telling just where on the Philadelphia stage the brasses, tympani, bass viols, and so on were placed. Hum and the other noises are only one three-hundredth of those heard from moving-picture theater sound equipment.
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This took me 5 minutes to find on the computer. Guaranteed I could come up with a reference to "depth" and the other concepts that folks, listening to HP's self-reporting, believe he invented.

I remind you, this article was a full FOUR DECADES before TAS was founded.

Who invented the terminology: more evidence it was not who you think it was.

One of HP's favorite words/concepts, which he claimed he coined, and wrote a long essay about: "Transparency."

From 1960, a Shure ad: "Shure announces a stereo arm and cartridge that recraates sound with an incredible fidelity, transparency,....."

There goes another concept and word that did not need inventing.
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Then listen to any of the 5 Fischer stereo perfectionist systems and you will hear hitherto unattainable tonal purity, STEREO DEPTH (my caps) and realism, a PANARAMIC SWEEP (my caps) of living sound......"

There we have both depth and width imaging concepts clearly described, 13 years before the founding of TAS.

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Go to this video and forward to 12 minutes 30 seconds and you will hear the phrase "....to create an illusion of depth and width....."

There we have it: the concepts of imagine, but going by the name "illusion"...I would submit that this is as good a word as "maging". But further, the words "width" and "depth": all that is needed to describe imaging. I suspect that I will also find the words "focus" and "space" used if I search a bit more.

The date of this video: 1957!!!!!

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The above is simply to support my original premise that it was not any individual reviewer who invented the concepts and vocabulary, about stereo, and to show that the concepts and vocabulary to describe depth, imaging, transparency, "closest to the live event" were in use before the 70's, when the magazines many think of as having defined high end stereo were founded.

The language and concepts were being developed decades before most readers of this forum assume.

Some of the criticism of Peter Aczel in this thread is overblown. In a changing environment for someone to alter their position can be considered a sign of an inquiring/flexible mind. "All amplifiers sound the same" is not an accurate statement of his position, it should read "all amplifiers should sound the same". If amplifiers are designed to be accurate to the input signal, then they should sound very much alike. Stereophile considered this issue when they put a Cary 805 tube amp on the cover with a Krell and asked, "If either of these amplifiers is RIGHT...the other is WRONG." Aczel believes that he had a methodology for determining if an amplifier was "right". Whether or not his methodology was correct or even useful is a tangent I won't pursue, but at least he was asking the question about accuracy. I believe that the real legacy of HP and his followers is that we are no longer concerned with high fidelity reproduction, or accuracy, but instead pursue good sound. The end result of this type of thinking is that we now talk about "the sound" of fuses, outlet covers, resistors and binding posts.

Aczel criticism overblown? I don't know that this would be possible.

Here's a guy who never published a particular issue, but write a bogus review for Carver saying that Carver had exactly duplicated the sound of a well known, very expensive amplifier. Nice little arrangement, Carver reprinted the excerpt from the non-existent issue and supplied them by the load to Carver dealers. Nice little bit of fraud on both sides. The amp, by the way, was very poor sounding compared to one Aczel said it was identical to, and took out many a tweeter of relatively easy to drive speakers at way less than its stated output power.