Why do audiophiles shun feedback in amplifiers?

Dracule1,
I agree this is semantics, we all seem to be describing the same natural character of acoustic bass.The difference is our individual ways of achieving this sound in our systems.You chose PP tubes,Kijanki with class D and me with SET amps. Different ears ,different solutions.
Regards,

As an aside, many years ago I had LWE speakers, which provided negative feedback from the speakers back to the amp. The idea was to monitor the speakers response to the input signal and correct the differences by providing feedback to the amp. So, it was an attempt to correct the imperfections of the speaker, rather than those of the amp. As I understand it, the feedback was trying to do more of a long term, overall correction rather than a short time duration correction. I was never sure how much the feedback effected the sound, but I did like them paired with an old Dynaco SS integrated. People always asked why I have wires coming out of the top of the amp. Obviously, the idea never made the main stream, but the speakers were well reviewed at the time.

I consider both acoustic and electronic forms of music in assessing quality of sound reproduction because I listen to it all. I have heard acoustic bass sound fabulous but synthesized bass be greatly lacking at the same time, and vice versa.

I listen to all sorts of music and even play electronic keyboards in my band.

'Tight' to me in its simplest definition is an artificial coloration imparted by overdamped speakers. You get a fast attack, but not so much body behind the initial thump. Depending on the amount of overdamped issues (no speaker is made that needs more than 20:1 BTW) this amount of body is variable. What I find is the low frequency ambient signature of the room is the first fatality to this problem.

Any tube amp can be made to have a 20:1 damping factor or more with enough feedback. Most transistor amps have considerably more. What I am talking about here is not really saying that the amp can't play bass right, but if there is no speaker that is not overdamped with that amp then its a moot point.

The head engineer of EV wrote a 2-part article about this back in the late 50s. You might think that somehow the physics that he was writing about went away in that time, but they didn't... about the only thing that is really different is that there are 4-ohm speakers now. If we are talking about a 4 ohm speaker, then the damping factor of the amp can be up to 40, as damping factor relates to 8 ohms only during measurement, whereas any speaker can be overdamped if its impedance is more than 20X that of the amp.

Ralph, My previous speakers had smaller woofers and smaller cabinets but bass extension was 5Hz lower. Bass quality wise it is much better now with more natural attack and decay. It sounds more even, resonating less with the room (same amplifier). I read that speaker bass can be tuned for max extension (it sells!) or for the lowest distortion. Bass now seems to be very melodic, natural and effortless while before it was a little congested. As for damping, my amp has DF=4000 at low frequencies, but it doesn't make much difference since xover inductor in series with the woofer is usually about 0.1ohm limiting DF to 80.

Dracule1, on p4 of the Stereophile article they test Cary amp with adjustable feedback and describe sound change. At the end no feedback sounded the best. It doesn't mean that amp had zero feedback. There could be still a lot of local and perhaps even some global feedback left.