You have to sacrifice some things to get high numbers in others lol, but generally imo high negative feedback designs that overdo it to get highest numbers on paper tend to have poor spatial creation from my experience, seems to be a common trend (as that negative feedback is what can give those good measurements as well but in turn affects fidelity if taken too far, but zero global negative feedback isn’t always good either, and from what I know I don’t really think you can make an amp without local negative feedback that sounds good lol). But I’m no amp designer and haven’t really looked into things so idk, I’ve heard good zero global negative feedback and good higher global negative feedback designs, so I guess it would come down to the skill of the designer in the end and if they actually care about the sound quality of their product and not how it looks on paper
When high refresh rate digital projectors came about in films, one of the earliest films I remember watching was the LOTR The Two Towers, a lot of people we commenting on the image feeling “unnatural”. This was one of the first films I recall watching in that format and they indeed felt weird.
I think a little distortion makes sound feel more natural, the way some R2R dacs measure worse but are preferred by some people at sounding more correct, tangible.
I think the OP though discussing the “tubiness” factor, there’s some inherent microphonics that are amplified when music is played loud.
In my op I vaguely remember talking about how human hearing depends on a type of distortion - change in pitch and time deadly from ear to ear - to localize sound. So I’m not ready to move away from some form of distortion in small quantities being a factor. @PolygonHell is probably also correct that microdetail resolution also plays a role.
I can 100% agree with you here, I fell into the measurement-trap and purchased the RME ADI-2 DAC
Note that I don’t regret my purchase, as it sounds fantastic and is extremely versatile - but I noticed that I lost something special that the FiiO K3 ($110) provided when running those Fostex cans
Still trying to figure out how to enhance that holographic sound without going tubes… perhaps Class A headphone amps? would really like a recommendation on what headphone amp provides lots of that “holographic” sound, and also would especially love a way to definitively figure out what it is that causes this effect
For 200USD the Schiit Asgard 3 does a damn good job with space. Now, depending on how you want to interpret “going tubes”, the Monolith Liquid Platinum does a fantastic job with space. It’s a tube hybrid with a tube preamp stage and a solid state amp stage. For solid state at roughly the same price as the Liquid Plat is the Lake People G111. It’s not particularly wide with its space bus does a really good job with imaging. I haven’t heard RNHP, but with certain headphones many of this forum’s member praise its holographicity (which I don’t think is a word, but should be).
the reason I wasn’t looking for another tube amp is I just received the Project Sunrise, so now I’m looking to see if that holographic effect can be achieved with SS only
I’ll check out those you mentioned - thanks!
FWIW I also read that someone claimed the DIYAudio Noir headphone amp is extremely holographic sounding… but I also found a review saying it was one of the worst performing amps measurement wise… take that for what you will. I’ll be trying to build one in the future, that’s for sure!
I’ll throw out my 2c based mostly on speculation.
-
cheaper amps rely on massive amounts of feedback to fix shortcomings of the circuit design and low quality parts. While THX amps are not necessarily cheap, they rely on massive amounts of feedback to achieve the crazy low THD numbers.
If you look at Pass Labs amps which are considered tube-like, they have very relatively little feedback. -
tube amps tend to be very simple circuits with usually very little or no feedback at all (hence their higher distortion numbers).
-
I have been encountering a lot of technical and scientific commentary discussing our auditory perception of phase. How sensitive we are to it and how much of a difference it makes.
-
Perhaps feedback does something whacky with phase and this is where we loose spatial cues. So a tube or other low feedback circuit trades THD for better phase characteristics.
I’m mostly speaking out of my ass here so if I’m way off, feel free to correct me.
It recently occurred to me that what’s going on with distortion being perceived as “better sounding” might be an audio parallel to what we have in video, where too high a frame rate (60-ish FPS) is perceived as un-cinematic and undesirable in movies and TV series, a.k.a. “the soap opera effect”. I confirmed this for myself by turning on the Auto Motion effect on my Samsung TV during movies (which leads to double the frame rate by generating interpolated frames between every 2 real frames) and indeed I found it disturbing and un-movie-like even if it was technically more accurate and realistic by showing smoother movements. This might be the kind of thing that’s happening with the harmonic distortion in tube sound.
But I think the stage aspect is another story altogether, where some tubes generate some level of reverb that increases the sense of “space”. I heard this in one of the tube-vs-SS demos on YouTube (maybe Zeos’ one) and while it had its attractiveness I wouldn’t want to listen like that all the time, since I interpret the effect as tacked-on, artificial, not coming from the recording. But this also might be something only cheap-ish tubes do - I seem to remember not being able to spot the difference between SS and the Woo Audio tube sound, so the expensive tubes might be doing something more subtle and possibly qualitatively different in terms of staging vs. the cheaper reverb-y tubes.
I am sympathetic to your argument about the super clean negative-feedback sound being new and unfamiliar and thus sound unnatural. To experience the new and unfamiliar as “unnatural” is a very human thing at times. I think that idea has some limitations in this context, however. With recorded music, we often have access to really good control observations, and that’s live music. In a non-pandemic world, it’s actually rather straightforward to find places where real instruments can be played by real people, plus we’re a species that communicates verbally on the regular. Many of us have ready access to the sound of real pianos, real guitars, etc. and we definitely have access to the sounds of human voices. That allows us to compare recorded sounds to real sounds with some level of ease and confidence. To my ear, in comparison to similar sounds IRL, the negative-feedback amplifier sound (think THX and A90 type amps here) bring a lot of cleanliness but they lack an element of realism. They sound cleaner and crisper than the things do IRL. IME, a well designed class A, class A/B, or tube amp get closer to the real sounds more consistently. That doesn’t mean there aren’t bad A, A/B, or tube amps, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t good class D amps, just that the odds of A, A/B, tube designs sounding more realistic and natural are greater than for D or THX designs.
I mean that’s partly because the whole idea of making something that measures extremely well with low distortion and harmonics is a pointless affair when everything you listen to already has a boatload of distortion and harmonics in comparison. For studio recording most of the time harmonic distortion is desirable and distortion is inherent in the recording itself even before modification from the microphone and electronics, along with stuff like room distortion, and most of the mixing and mastering process ends up adding more distortion (both desirable and undesirable distortion). If you were able to have a source material that had as low of distortion as the equipment you are listening on (idk, perhaps a single sine wave) then perhaps that would sound more correct but that just isn’t going to happen for the most part.
That’s probably because it’s much harder to make a class a or a/b let alone a tube amp stack up measurement wise to a high feedback class d, so most making the a/ab designs won’t take a chart topping measurement focused approach. I have heard excellent class d amps, but I will say none of them really lead in measurements, personally I don’t like the bog standard high measurement implementations of class d though.
To be honest imo a good tube amp typically isn’t something you can listen to and immediately know it’s a tube amp, the goal for most products is realism (the designers interpretation of it lol), and tbh how they decide to get to that goal, tube or ss, as long as it sounds good I don’t care all too much in what tech they use. In the higher end both tube and ss can sound equally realistic and you might be hard pressed to tell what amps have a tube or not if you can’t see one sticking out of there (I think I already said this actually so nvm). Of course there are some characteristics that can key you into if something is using a tube or not, but depending on how it’s implemented even those can be hard to tell
Tubes are pretty.
Pretty nice in the winter too, good space heater and project cool patterns on your ceiling at night
Tubes do a “thing” and many times several different “things” to music. They absolutely have an effect in soundstage, imaging, clarity, musicality etc. My own personal preferences though fall within the Genre of music I am listening to and if care to add the changes tubes offer. I prefer solid state for specific genre’s as I do NOT enjoy what spacial and harmonic effects tubes add to some styles of music. This particular peculiarity in my musical tastes has to do very specifically to the amount of low end bass and “thumping” i want in in my music, tubes interfere with my bass and this is based purely on quantity not quality.
Tubes have a place and yes they make certain changes to music that i find very enjoyable, same thing goes to solid state though on a very opposite side of the spectrum…at least in my systems 