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Point to Point vs Circuit Board

I just read this about point to point wiring:

First, there’s the music’s signal. You spend a lot of money on interconnects. So why have the signal go right from the RCA jacks or speaker terminals into circuit boards with copper traces so thin you can hardly see them? What’s high-end about that?


I've now heard about point to point wiring in the case of tube amp companies (Jadis, PrimaLuna) and my question is does point to point wiring exist for solid state amps? When I look at images inside amps online all solid state amps seem to use circuit boards. Is there such thing as a point to point transistor amp or must they necessarily have circuit boards? If so, which companies?

Thanks

gmercer
gmercer OP
193 posts
 
Respectfully, with this Question/thread I was hoping to find out whether P2P can be done with solid state, and if so, whether anyone out there is doing it. I am not "hyperfocused" on it, beyond being generally curious enough to pose this question.

Sounds like P2P cannot really be done with solid state, if any of the engineers around here know why I'd be very curious to hear, and as a result no companies are doing it.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,966 posts
 
The issue is stray capacitance. In solid state amps this is far less of an issue with solid state since the impedances are so much lower. As a consequence there's no advantage to hand wiring a solid state amp other than not spending the time and money to design and fabricate the circuit boards.
czarivey
5,946 posts
 
looks like P2P and PIA are synonyms. 
erik_squires
16,404 posts
 
It's the size of the pins my friend.

You don't need giant traces for low current signals. More important is how you route them and the capacitance/inductance caused.  Even with these tiny signal paths most designers will use far bigger traces for power and ground traces or even use the entire board as a power or ground.

There's also arguments to be made for the superior behavior of surface mounted devices vs. pinned IC's in terms of capacitance and inductance at the connectors themselves, making them impossible to be point to point.


larryi
4,114 posts
 
I know a builder that does something pretty unique.  He primarily builds amps, preamps and linestages, but, he also builds DACs.  All of his builds employ point-to-point wiring (he builds tube gear), but for the DAC, a circuit board is used for the digital/conversion part of the unit.  But, the circuit board is not actually printed, even if it looks to be a printed board on casual inspection.  The board is a sheet of bakelite with a sheet of copper bonded to the bakelite.  The circuit traces are made by CNC machining out of the copper sheet to leave the traces.  
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