+1
Is faster necessarily better?
I have read a review of the Berning Quadrature Z monoblocks by 2 different editors of HiFi+...one of them wrote something like "i have never heard anyone complain about an amp being too fast." I think the point he was making was that the amp's job is simply to pass along the signal coming thru...with no way to speed up the music, make rim shots faster...he was basically suggesting that speed was one factor that allowed for transparency. What comes in...goes straight out without delay.
I think, in isolation, that concept makes sense to me. Obviously, there can be side effects in trying to design equipment to do this which might be deleterious, but i cannot imagine this one aspect alone can be bad. And i could imagine that this one aspect should be better...all else being equal.
Not sure that I'd agree. Remember the adage speed kills . Years ago was talking to Dan D'Agostino about that subject and he told me that he could and had designed ultra fast circuits but you woudn't want to hear them
So maybe those ultra fast designs were eliminated in the design stages and never saw the light of the day.
Speed - aka the ability to track the signal as best as possible w/o smearing - is a requisite for accurate reproduction, but not the only one; and it's extremely hard to implement in the SS domain. I have a feeling D'Agostino has finally mastered that too with his new amps. Some tubes - with up to 100MHz bandwidth - are the masters in this department, and everyone else an imitator; I think Mike Lavigne covered that best.
Speed - aka the ability to track the signal as best as possible w/o smearing - is a requisite for accurate reproduction, but not the only one; and it's extremely hard to implement in the SS domain. I have a feeling D'Agostino has finally mastered that too with his new amps. Some tubes - with up to 100MHz bandwidth - are the masters in this department, and everyone else an imitator; I think Mike Lavigne covered that best.
IN most tubes equipment the transformer is the limiting factor.. However large the bandwidth of the tubes used in the system it will have to contend with the transformers which by their very principle of operation slow down fast rising signals ... SS don't have that thus the lightning quickness of some of them . Spectral and Goldmund comes to mind.. again but also Krell and maybe other wide-bandwidth SS gear... Show me the rise time of the fastest tube amp and it's likely a multiple of many SS... For preamps I don't know, I haven't seen the rise times so ...
I am not sure i agree with the point. I would suppose that OTL are as fast as they come be but I have not seem the rise and settling time of an OTL gear so .. Subjectively they sound fast to me .. and if I were to go back to tubes.. it would be OTL. likely my favorite the Joule Electra "Rite of Passage".
I understand many here refutes the notion of measurements.. but the speed of an amp is a measurable quantity. Rise Time, Slew Rates and settling times are indications of the "speed" of an amp there may be more parameters but it remains that "speed" is measurable ..
If one wants to see this as a subjective quality then anything goes ... and in that realm one can "decide" that the Dynaco ST-70 is "faster" than the Spectral DMA-360
IN most tubes equipment the transformer is the limiting factor.. However large the bandwidth of the tubes used in the system it will have to contend with the transformers which by their very principle of operation slow down fast rising signals ... SS don't have that thus the lightning quickness of some of them . Spectral and Goldmund comes to mind.. again but also Krell and maybe other wide-bandwidth SS gear... Show me the rise time of the fastest tube amp and it's likely a multiple of many SS... For preamps I don't know, I haven't seen the rise times so ...
I am not sure i agree with the point. I would suppose that OTL are as fast as they come be but I have not seem the rise and settling time of an OTL gear so .. Subjectively they sound fast to me .. and if I were to go back to tubes.. it would be OTL. likely my favorite the Joule Electra "Rite of Passage".
I understand many here refutes the notion of measurements.. but the speed of an amp is a measurable quantity. Rise Time, Slew Rates and settling times are indications of the "speed" of an amp there may be more parameters but it remains that "speed" is measurable ..
If one wants to see this as a subjective quality then anything goes ... and in that realm one can "decide" that the Dynaco ST-70 is "faster" than the Spectral DMA-360
I think you misinterpreted what I said. I spoke about the speed of some tubes and you took it to mean amp and preamp implementations. I don't know which impl is faster but the point about xformers is valid
IN the context of absolute hyper speed (Read Radar or higher) that is a maybe in the context of Audio Amps it's not true.. SS with large bandwidth are almost routine.Speed - aka the ability to track the signal as best as possible w/o smearing - is a requisite for accurate reproduction, but not the only one; and it's extremely hard to implement in the SS domain.
These would lead me or anyone that you are talking about audio amps and not the intrinsic qualities of tubes in fact that is the context of this discussion I would think. To that I replied that for tubes amplifier regardless of the intrinsic qualities of the tubes used they gould go to Gigahertz the transformers will limit the speed .. then I added that if you're talking about subjective impression of speed then all bets are off...I have a feeling D'Agostino has finally mastered that too with his new amps.
<snip>But after reading "the speed inside the note," I'm not sure I know what you're talking about at all.
Tim
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