What are the best GaN Amplifiers available today?

From what I understand, both Ric and Ralph make significant contributions for audiophiles and music lovers all around. As both engineers and designers, it is healthy to have different viewpoints and approaches. In this case, it seems this disagreement is making the thread go off the rails a bit.

Generalized statements are painful. While Ralph may prioritize noise elimination, is it true that he believes it is the only thing that matters? While Ric focuses on improvements to existing architectures, does it mean he doesn't understand distortion or how to do his job without keeping noise away? As system thinkers, you probably share more than you think, but it's obvious you've lost track of common ground with each other. I hope you regain it, at least to agree to disagree in ways that enable each of you to push each other to make even higher performing components. And hopefully, so you don't spite each other on a public forum.

I vote for both of you to have a 5-day hackathon locked in a room somewhere to land on a design together. I bet great things would happen, that is, unless only one of you would come out of the room alive at the end of it!

The reason I went to Ric for mods was I had my Sony SCD-1 modded 20 years ago the way Ric described in his post (by KERN I think). The change in sound was incredible, especially in the SACD layer. I had that player for over 20 years, and it only died earlier this year. Someone bought it from me for the parts. The warranty was the least of my concerns.

Regarding the Magenepan LRS+ and the GAN400. I had this setup in the past and getting the GAN400 delivered either today or tomorrow for the LRS+. It has a bit of hardness to the top that makes it slightly less than fantastic.

I was not aware that Ric does mods on the GAN400 and that the module is the same as the Voyager 350 GAN. He did the mod on my old Voyager 350 GAN so I may consider getting the GAN400 modded if I plan on keeping it. The warranty on the unit I am getting expired already.

Generalized statements are painful. While Ralph may prioritize noise elimination, is it true that he believes it is the only thing that matters?

@blisshifi Of course not! @ricevs apparently has a lot of misconceptions and is putting words in my mouth, making claims that I never made. My position about distortion has been clear for a long time. I've been building class A triode zero feedback OTLs for over 45 years and in amps like that everything you do makes a difference because the amps lack feedback. This is the same as in SETs, of which most also lack feedback.

Just because something was knowledge 90 years ago, like 2+2=4, does not mean its not true today. What is different now, which simply had to be accepted back then, is we know why our ears respond to distortion the way they do. In his comments, Ric conveys that he has not obtained this as part of his knowledge base. He's got a lot of company in that regard- many solid state amplifier designers don't really care what sort of harmonic spectra their amps make.

But some do and not surprisingly their amps get more regard in the audiophile community where people 'follow their ears'. For one to push exactly that sort of philosophy, which I've no problem with at all, since that very thing has kept me in business, that the reason why is being described as poppycock is really a bit astonishing and ironic. You'd think this would be of paramount importance to one who has built his business model 'following one's ears'!

Obviously not all amps are the same. Those with very high feedback amounts will respond less to things like fuseholders, IEC connectors and the like because they have the ability to reject that which is not like the signal. But amplifiers with little or no feedback are very prone to these influences.

Regardless of how much luck one may have had doing mods, class D amplifiers are quite sensitive to layout problems, stray capacitance and parasitic inductance that other amplifier technologies simply are not. It may be that you don't hear any audible artifact from a modified amplifier, but without testing it you really don't know what's actually going on. That's a fact and no amount of remonstration on Ric's part will change that. Integrity requires that sort of testing for noise be conducted, if one is being paid to make changes.

The simple fact is that audio would not exist as a hobby if engineering did not exist. Nothing that we do in the audio world is magic- there is an engineering correlation to everything we hear. But you have to know how the human hearing perceptual rules work to be able to sort out some of the whys.

I find it amusing that someone is trying to denigrate me by lumping me in with the measurement camp. I'm not part of that; what I've found is that correlation I mentioned. Both the subjectivist camp and the measurement camp hate the idea that you can draw a direct line between what we hear in audio circuits and what we can measure in them. Many audiophiles still live their lives according to the myth that we can hear things we can't measure (which was true in the 1980s) as if somehow measurement technology had not marched into the present the same way that every other tech has improved over the last 35 years! Imagine trying to surf the web on an Apple 2 😁

«Both speech and music occupy similar, albeit slightly different frequency ranges. The lowest frequency element of speech is the fundamental frequency, which for a male voice is on the order of 100-125 Hz. (Johnson, 2003). In the human vocal tract, the vibration of the vocal cords for voiced sounds defines the fundamental frequency and its higher-frequency harmonic content and this limits the low-frequency end of the vocal output. There is simply no speech energy below the frequency of the fundamental. In contrast, musical instruments can generate significantly lower frequency with fundamental energy on the order of 40-50 Hz for bass instruments. Figure 1 shows a treble clef showing several musical notes and the frequency of their fundamentals. Middle C (just below the treble clef) is 262 Hz, and a typical male’s fundamental frequency is an octave below that (approximately 125 Hz).

However music, like speech, is slightly more complicated than just a rendition of any frequency components available or audible. In turns out that in music, like speech, it is not the fundamental frequency that defines the “pitch” of the note but the difference between any two successive harmonics. This is called the missing fundamental and explains why one only needs to hear the higher-frequency harmonics to define the pitch, which in some cases is below the bandwidth of the transmitter.»

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1084713812468512

III.
CONCLUSIONS
ß For fundamental frequencies of up to about 1400 Hz,
the pitch of a complex tone is determined by the second
and higher harmonics and not by the fundamental,
whereas beyond this frequency the opposite holds;
this is the case both for tones with harmonics of equal
amplitude and for tones with harmonics of which the
amplitudes fall by 6 dB/oct.
ß For fundamental frequencies
of up to about 700 Hz,
the pitch is determined by the third and higher har-
monics; for frequencies up to about 350 Hz, by the
fourth and higher harmonics.
ß The experimental results strongly suggest that the
pitch of complex tones is based on periodicity rather
than on frequency; it is reasonable
that this also holds
for simple tones.
 

Pitch of complex tones -Plomp- 1967