Most transparent amp you've heard?

Most transparent amp you've heard?

That's easy. The most transparent amps I've heard are from Atma-Sphere, whether the M-60, MA-1 or MA-2.

What does 'transparent' mean - or what do I mean when I use that term? In a somewhat serious way, I mean the absence of the sort of distortion caused by output transformers between the gain stage and speakers. More generally I'd say, more transparency means less distortion. A transparent amp will lend itself to neutrality, but I don't think 'neutral' fully sums up 'transparent', unless you simply consider the terms as tautological.

I think of 'neutrality' almost exclusively in terms of tone character. Apart from tonal neutrality, phase coherency is an important aspect of transparency. The inductive and capacitive character of wire can introduce a sort of temporal distortion or smearing that greatly influences transparency. (...and a transformer happens to be one of the places where you find a lot of wire.) I don't think of hysteresis loss as increasing distortion as much as reducing signal, which is more a reduction of information than a distortion. But semantic entanglements approach.

Discussions of amp transparency probably should not look solely at the amp itself, but need to consider the amp/speaker interface and amp/speaker interaction. A slightly different question might be: what is the most transparent amp/speaker combo you've heard?

Tim
 

FWIW, I've have come to use the word transparency with a fairly literal definition: the ability to see what comes before it. The more transparent a component is, the more I will be able to observe differences as changes are made ahead of it in the system. It's not a perfect definition for all sorts of reasons, but it I think it holds up pretty well. This definition is likely to correlate with neutrality, but it doesn't have to. Seems to me that neutrality stands on its own pretty well as an audiophile term, as do Pabul57's "low noise, speed, space between instruments, and a sense of immediacy."

Is the Audiophile Dictionary JGH's thing?

I'm being fussy about this because transparency is used so often by audiophiles and I have no idea what they mean by it.

OK, here is what transparent means.

about 8 years ago i fell in love with the Tenor OTL 75 watt integrated monoblocks. at the time i owned a Mark Levinson #32 preamp which i considered very highly. one day i compared the integrated passive volume control in the Tenors to the #32. the resistor based passive in the Tenors sounded way less veiled and much more immediate and alive. Goodby Levinson.

next i wanted remote volume control; so i purchased a Placette RVC and tried the Tenor's thru the Placette RVC. i could hear no difference between listening direct thru the Tenor's volume control and adding the Placette RVC even if i used the line out from the volume attenuator.....in other words the Placette was transparent to the source.

it gets better.

it turns out you can stack 5 Placette RVC's end to end and you cannot hear any difference between these 5 stacked RVC's and only one of them, or none of them.

the Placette RVC was truely transparent to the source.....it changes nothing (or rather my ears could not detect any difference).

that is my definition of transparent.....what other audio electronics could do that?

btw; transparency is not the end all factor of sonic bliss; but it is an important issue.

I'm in complete agreement with Mike. I've owned Placette products and they definitely qualify. No tube preamp I've ever owned qualifies, though there may be some out there, but that's not to say they don't have a lot of other things to recommend them.

Parasound Halo JC1s .. most transparent amps I have listened