Amps that Warm Thing Up (yuk!)

That's one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it woupd be if a recording was made somewhere sterile - like a dead flat studio - as opposed to a lively venue that adds warmth to the performance. If it is the same performer in both places, you'll get one cold recording and one warm recording. You cannot call one of them right and the other wrong, can you?

So if your amp adds a bit of warmth, how is that unlike recording a performance somewhere that gives a warm sound?

I don't think reproduced music will ever be as good as the real thing. For me, listening to a recorded performance is an event in itself. Playback will never recreate the original, so why not adjust it to something you will enjoy? It doesn't hurt anything and it gives the listener pleasure. Why not?

Further, recordings get tweaked a lot in the studio. Most of the time, the engineer adjusts them so they don't sound like the original.

Who is to say which is the correct way to listen?

I support Uncle Erik's view. After all, isn't this entire hobby about finding your preferred sound? If a person likes a *warm* sound, so be it.

I like vanilla ice cream with a little chocolate on it.  My son likes his ice cream with a lot of chocolate on it.  My wife thinks chocolate is an abomination.  It is all about taste, bias,  preference, ideology and perhaps "religion".

 

"The warmth is actually just good old fashioned harmonic distortion. If an amplifier is to accurately amplify its input then this harmonic distortion is a failure of its design."  

 

Actually it could be an intent of the design because that is what the designers (or marketers) want to provide as a means of distinguishing their product from the field - hype or not.  It is up to the consumer to decide how much "chocolate" they want with their audio based on their taste, bias etc.   If distortion free, perfectly flat amplification were the ideal and all designs conformed to that specification, then there would only need to be one amplifier because all amplifiers would sound exactly the same.

 

The same discussion could be had about tone controls.  I have always wondered why some High End, esoteric audiophile equipment designers disdain the use of tone controls, either pots or switched, in the pursuit of the "wire with gain" amplification model.  While avoidance of properties that pollute the audio signal is admirable, shaping the tonal qualities of the audio signal to suit taste or a limitation of another element in the chain (perhaps headphones) should not be avoided with the same rigor.  

 

Some of my sources have tone controls or equalization and some do not.  The choice of which source to use is usually a matter of setting and convenience.

 

Anyhoo,  it is what it is.  Buy the audio products that have the specifications you like and leave the rest on the shelf.  The solution is a market driven.  Products that please (either the intellect or the ear) will survive and those that don't, won't.

 

 

Super low THD% amps are most commonly designed with high open loop gain and lots of NFB.

They also sound dead as a carp and lacking any kind of air.

If measurements were a perfect proxy for subjective listening pleasure,

the state of the art would have reached an endpoint decades ago. 

The race for bragging rights to the lowest THD% specs was a 70's~90's phenomenon. 

THD doesn't become a factor the typical user can hear until it reaches almost 1%.

The NFB used to subdue it to orders of magnitude below audibility has negative(pun) consequences though.

It isn't that users prefer more THD, it is that getting it far below audibility is too much of a tradeoff.

A knowledgeable shopper now-days looks on an exceptionally low advertised THD% with suspicion.

There are a few noteworthy designs that are both "warm" and also have vanishingly small THD%. The B22

is typically reported as "warm" and also turns in great THD% numbers.   

Edited by bada bing - 10/29/10 at 10:57am

There was a very good magazine article about this a little while ago.  IRC, the crux of it was not really how much distortion but how it distorts, and I believe frequency response as well.  Mostly the article talked a lot about tape machines, but also vacuum tubes and transformers, etc. 

If you want a high fidelity reproduction of live event then you have to listen at same sound pressure level.

Now, do you really want to listen to Mahler's symphonies at 110db, right in your ears, every night? I don't :-)

 

Headphones listening is different from speakers, you don't want he same level of detail and you don't get the same 'bass impact'. According to my ears, some warmth is needed to fully enjoy music.

I think sound is a personal preference. Some consumers prefer a warmer sound, some prefer a more neutral and clinical sound. You should buy what you like! If you want sterile, perfect sound then by all means don't buy a 'warming' amp, but I don't think you should look down your nose at those that do prefer a warmer sound. After all, music enjoyment is about a persons emotional reaction to music, less about about sine waves, perfect wires, and color.

@Patric: Very well said, completely true and spot on. Thank you for this excellent post.

It reminds me the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes.

The Warming amps argument lacks the very basic logic - you want as perfect reproduction as possible between the capturing devices (microphones, etc) and the human ears.

Any thing that adds or removes to it simply distorts what was intended to be heard one particular way.

If that is acceptable then it is completely pointless to have a notion of High vs low end components (because everything is a matter of taste ). The taste should be applied to the produced music, e.g. the musicians' instrument tones, the studio work etc. But to try to say that the listener can fix up possible deficiencies that occurred in the earlier pieces of the production chain is plain nonsense and is even more a nonsense to assume that there can be a "warming" amp that improves the deficiencies universally.   

 

But I see a lot of confusion and lack of differentiation between instrument amplifiers and full range hifi amplification. 

While the full range hifi amps are desirable to be completely neutral and responsive to details, the instrument amps are desirable to add the "warmth" that many speak of so indifferently. It doesn't cease to amaze me how people buy into the business of "warming" amps as full range components into their hifi systems.

As you "Patric" said there is no universal toning that would suit every kind of music. One kind of toning may appear to improve 1 kind of music sound but stuffs up the other 99 kinds of music.

 

I wonder when will people realise that the "Emperor is naked" 

 

@Bada Bing: I also fully agree with your reply and endorsement of the Beta22, but I suspect that the term "warm" is imagined and interpreted by everyone differently.

 

Edited by GxxL - 10/31/10 at 6:20am

patrick,

i would do some searches for "Transient Intermodulation Distortion" and John Curl.  the first page of this NP article is pertinent to TIM as well: http://www.passdiy.com/pdf/cascode.pdf.  

Just subjectively here, some amps do calm things down in a way that is just perfect (my RSA B52 is one).  To my ears, Rudistor's RP010B is another.

They don't blunt the sound or add some kind of strange artificial detail-removal (like tone controls do, as I have heard when I tried equalization in many forms).

I really think with  some amps you can have it all, miraculously, and my B52 is one of them. (And judging from some of the collective praise here for other amps, I'm sure others do the same.)

Edited by rgs9200m - 10/31/10 at 10:20am

As seductive as patrick's argument is, I think it's ultimately off base.

 

Here's why:

 

- While acknowledging no amp is perfect, patrick's philosophical position is - get as close to perfect as possible, perfect being a transparent passing through of what the musicians/producers/mastering engineers intended.

 

The problem is, almost as soon as the music is committed to tape you're involved in interpreting it. If the Beatles and George Martin did playback on LS3/5as, they got one take on the sound and mixed accordingly. You can argue it makes no difference, whatever they intended as a result of their listening is what you're aiming for in reproduction, but the fact remains the initial 'sound' has already been biased.

 

- As a thought experiment, imagine a perfect music reproducer, a system tuned as finely as humanly possible to original intent. It will still be used in different rooms, by different people with different levels of knowledge and acuity in hearing, in different moods. All of these things will affect the sound.

 

You could then argue - if there is that much distortion you can't avoid, why add more? However...

 

- The correct goal is less striving for an absolute, and more trying for that which pleases. This doesn't reduce the question of good sound to mere opinion, any more than meals prepared by two great chefs are only opinions about what tastes good. They may have different takes on the same dish, but they both bring an understanding of the basics of cooking (and then some) to the table.

 

It's the same with reproducing music - it's unavoidably an active thing and what you're buying is someone's take on what sounds right. People who are serious about this stuff avoid the overtly 'additive' touches you get with home theater systems, but they often can accept that you can, for instance, recover some of the ambiance in some cds and use it for back channels. And when I'm listening on HPs, I know the experience of the cd is much different from the full rangers in my family room.

 

I think the main point is not to be reductive, to not worry about what I'm adding, within reason. We're humans, we're messy and we should hope that what comes out of our speakers or phones is reasonably factual and deeply true.

 

s. 

Very well said, satkinsn. I enjoyed reading that.

You know... some headphones were built with being used with tube amps in mind. My W1000 never sounded good through a neutral source. It would be unbelievably dry sounding. It is also said that Yamamoto Soundcraft provided the cups for the W1000 to be used with the Yamamoto HA 02 tube amp.

 

I have not yet heard a more musical combination for vocals than my W1000 w/ my tube amp. But I still have to capture one more elusive headphone.

Too my ears, wind016, I'm starting to think a lot of headphones are voiced for tubes (or at least warm, tube-like solid state).

I've mentioned here that I think HD800s are a prime example of this, and maybe T1s, too.