Most amps employ a global negative feedback loop, which aside from setting the voltage gain of the amp, reduces output impedance, distortion, DC offset, and generally improves the circuit's bandwidth and stability. However, such a loop is not without its problems. The loop will fail when the amp encounters a transient signal that is faster than the group delay time of the amp, causing slew-induced distortion. This is why engineers prefer to employ high-speed, wide band designs, and reduce the amount of overall global feedback such that slew-induced distortion cannot be triggered by in-band (audio) signals.
Some designers take a different approach, and employ enough local feedback within the different stages of the amp to set overall gain of the amp, and dispense with the global loop altogether. This kind of amp in theory has none of the shortcomings of a global feedback loop, but could have generally higher output impedance, distortion, offset, and reduced stability and bandwidth.
Which approach is "superior" cannot be generalized, and sometimes become religious topics.
