What are the best GaN Amplifiers available today?

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 

Perhaps amplifier designer must be preoccupied by the way their design produce Harmonic spectra... 😊

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.

"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!"

The above statement is the real MYTH....it cannot be proven. The TRUTH is that you cannot measure wire, jacks, resistors, solder, removing unneeded parts, upgrading most parts, etc.......but these things all make a sonic differentce that you can hear. In audio...it is the sound that is real.....not some pretend myth measurement dance.

If Ralph wants to believe that everything you hear can be measured....well let him live in that realiy....nothing wroing with that. But, for those with ears.....we know....we know all cables sound different.....and we know there is no measurement tool that can tell us how they measure (because wires do not measure.....other than capacitance, resistance and inductance......which by themselves do little to tell us how something sounds).

The "more feedback equals less differences in parts" thang that Ralph stated is totally untrue (poppycock!). I mod the Purifi amps that have tons of feedback....way more than Ralphs amps.....and everything I do makes the same sonic difference when done on the ZERO feedack digital amps I mod.  I havae worked on several high feedback solid state class A/B amps over the years.......everything I do can be heard just like any other less feedback amp.

Those with Ralph's amp can do a quick test.....just remove the covers and remove all the hardware on the toroidal transformer.....lift it off the chassis and place a quarter inch thick piece of wood underneath.....put the transformer back down and listen.  This CANNOT be measured.....but it can be heard....by YOU!

The Iconoclast wires by Belden were designed by a very scientific guy. However, they make them in three grades.....regular copper, OFC copper and PCOCC copper........do they sound the same?....(same exact construction, just different pruity of wire)....NO, the more pure wire ones sounds better......Can they measure the difference?.....NADA.

Have a great every moment!