What is stopping the ultimate?

Re Bishop, Clueless, Greg, excellent points: Amp ESL speaker interaction is even more complex, as I painflully learnt through the years, because ESLs don't show a resistive load to the amp, have crazy impedance curves and since watt specs don't necesarily tell you the current capability of an amp, you can make costly mistakes, thinkling you've bought a powerhouse, which then conks out on you on really high notes. Hence also the fable, that ESLs have no real high end. You need current, lots of it and then a violin will have its overtones, a Steinway will sound like one also in the top octaves and a Coloratura in full steam will make your hair stand properly on end. Cheers,

Detlof - ESLs. You are so right, raise completely different needs in amps and wire too. The ESL acts more like a capacitor in the circuit, and with a transformer there too, raises all sorts of unique inductance/capacitance resonance issues. Special concerns about the inductance parameters of your wire as far as I understand -which isn't too far. Helps so much to understand what can be measured and what is understandable -but in the end the reference is one's ears. Detlof-have you ever heard differences in highs, some unwanted peaks, due to wire alone?

With regard to conventional speakers, I still want to play around with the idea of an amp that is variable impedence and designed specifically for one load/speaker, which is a point Tac brought up a few posts ago.

An audio system is really one circuit and it help to think of it that way instead of as discrete, separate, little enclosed boxes. We don't buy a car from five different vendors; body from one, frame from another, motor from third, all not knowing what the others design intentions are.

Back to topic on this thread we are so far from ultimate that it is depressing if you think about it. The amount and kinds of distortion just in speakers is crazy. Harmonic, intermodulation, crossmodulation, mechanical resonance.....the speaker is playing it's own tune really and it will be this way until the driver diaphram's density is equal to that of air and has absolutely uniform acceleration over the entire surface at all frequencies. Requires a speaker with trillions of microscopic transducers and nanotechnology or something- Lynn Olson has some interesting things to say about this stuff and most of my opinions just reflect a few folk like him.

Joke: what do you call the time between the point you step on the banana peel and when you fall on your arse?

- a bananosecond

Sincerely
I remain,

Clueless,

That joke has a peel.

I'm still brainstorming on a "full-range" plasma driver without the ozone problems or paying $2-$5 an hour to run pressurized gas tanks. If I could get one of those down to 100hz-step aside ribbons, electrostats, electrodynamics, and bending wave transducers. And spend all the loving time building the mother of all subwoofers to go with. Wouldn't have to worry about crossover points in the midband, time delay, phase problems, cabinet resonances, doppler distortion, puh.. gone. One beautiful pulsing point source. Who knows. I know they've been run down to 700hz :). Nelson Pass' "ion cloud" put him in the hospital, but it ran full-range I believe.

I would say the Audio press "Elite" are the biggest anchor to advancement. I just received a Sony SCD-777ES SACD Player
last night. It will be paired with my Pass Aleph P pre-amp
& Pass Aleph 2 monoblocs. All these pieces are state of the art to me. They're also all discontinued & essentially forgotten by The Absolute Sound & Stereophile.
Harry Pearson says you need a minimum 200 watts per channel. Robert Harley says the new multi channel Sony SCD-XA777ES player shows potential. I say B.S.
I'll settle for (I want) HIGH QUALITY 2-channel MUSIC. My music system components get moved to my video syetem as they are replaced by something better.
There's nothing more bogus than reading a review of a "totally neutral" tube amp or pre-amp. I've owned tube equipment. I bought it for "tube sound"! Why on earth would anyone put up with tube heat & maintenance issues to obtain "neutral" SOLID STATE sound?
In Absolute Sound isssue 133, Anna Logg says the BAT VK-75SE Amp "is a reference-level amplifier that produces, without coloration, exactly what is fed to it". In the NEXT paragraph she says the amp delivers the fabled triode midrange, paired with a solid state or tube pre-amp.
Aren't triode fanatics looking for "romantic"(colored)sound? Isn't that the point of tubes?
Is 9:00a.m. too early for a beer?

Daniel