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From: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: TUBE DESIGN
Summary: It's hard to please people.
Keywords: coloration
Message-ID: <3948@osc.COM>
Date: 30 Oct 90 22:30:21 GMT
References: <13b593cad136270a1244@canremote.uucp> <57@sierra.STANFORD.EDU> <271c8c45-4b1.2sci.electronics-1@vpnet.chi.il.us> <1990Oct20.220252.1269@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Oct21.171736.9918@wsrcc.uucp> <5283@mit-caf.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane)
Organization: Versant Object Technology, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 21

I think one of the toughest problems facing today's designer is that for
people to like your equipment it has to add the right coloration.

Digital recording almost eliminates noise and distortion due to the recording.
With today's electronics you can get ridiculously low levels of non-linearity,
so your THD and IMD figures are going to be much better than what hi-fi
standards used to be.  Also with careful design the frequency response of the
amplifiers can be very flat.  Then with many-band equalizers you can get rid
of any variation frequency response due to speakers or room acoustics.

Now we've got a technically superior system, where the sound produced is very
close to the sound originally picked up by the microphone.  Guess what?
People don't like it, because it's `boring'.  Vinyl has more `clarity'; tube
amps are more `musical', some other system has more `presence'.

So now to get a better product you have to go back and break some things you
worked so hard to get right.  Maybe add some white noise to sound like a
record, add some second harmonic distortion to get the tube amp sound, boost
some frequencies to sound like some other speaker system.  Wouldn't it be nice
if you could just buy boxes which do this for you?  Then your amplifier
wouldn't do anything to the sound, so they all would sound the same.