Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

That is an often quoted, but incorrect analysis; an amp that distorts audibly is not a good amp. I can buy both solid state and tube amps that do not distort relevantly.

The perfect amp is a wire with gain, no matter the technology it uses.

View on HN

What you are saying is correct from an engineering standpoint but it completely ignores the human psychology.

Tube amps produce a lot of (not only harmonic) distortion, especially the cheap stuff. And then there are also various nonlinearities due to the inevitable transformers, tubes aging, mains hum, etc.

The problem is that musicians (and not only) were "raised" on this type of "sound". So they consider this to be the nominal, "correct" way how an amplifier is supposed to sound like - especially that one obscure box they got 40 years ago at a garage sale somewhere is the gold standard.

They don't know squat about harmonics, distortion etc, many barely understand that the blinking red light on the amp indicating clipping is not what one is supposed to see and not the signal level one is supposed to adjust the gain pot to.

But they then see that a clean solid state amplifier (or even a tube one with a lot of negative feedback and compensation) sounds different, thus it has to be the one that is "wrong" and "sounds bad".

That's where the myth about tubes sounding "better" comes from. It has little to do with actual measurable distortion value.

The engineering standpoint is the only correct one when it comes to overall audio and signal quality. The human psychology part is how people get so easily scammed with nonsense in the audiophile space

Yeah, the "human psychology" bit is how you end up buying 200$ 3.5mm cables

There's an argument to be made though that at some level it's all psychology, no? Isn't all music psychology?

I agree audiophile stuff is full of nonsense but I guess when there are differences, even if one isn't objectively better or worse, it might be good to understand the differences and history behind them because sometimes that's the nature of the thing.

Not really, no. I'm talking about signal reproduction which we can definitely measure.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

You're correct, but you're misrepresenting it as a problem. I don't have any audio hardware that doesn't distort audio in some way. I intentionally use headphones that change how my music sounds. For people who listen to music as a hobby, 1:1 sound reproduction isn't the goal and it doesn't need to be. It might be crucial for somebody editing audio, but that doesn't apply to the 99.999% of people who listen to music.

That is a patently false statement. Extensive A/B tests have shown that most people don't like a coloured sound and instead prefer a flat frequency response with low distortion. You can convince yourself that your expensive audiophile headphone with coloured sound are amazing for you, but research clearly shows that preference in relation to music reproduction is not some sort of deeply personal preference that differs from person to person. Audiophiles seem to all try and convince themselves that it is and everybody is on their own audiophile discovery journey to find the sound they like, when these audiophiles are actually subjected to a blind A/B test, they find out that they're actually much closer to the norm than they'd like to admit...

I don't know what to tell you. Given a choice between headphones with more bass and studio monitor headphones, I'll take the ones with more bass. I'll also prefer headphones that have more subdued highs, because I'm sensitive to them and they hurt my ears. I don't need a blind A/B test for that. I don't need a scientific experiment to figure out what I like. You can't always reduce human experience down to A/B tests.

Also, I wonder why you care so much about "audiophiles".

That’s why people HATE studio monitors, because they love a flat frequency response?

For reproduction. The topic at hand is art generation. The perfect amp doesn't exist because it changes from listener to listener and moment to moment. That said, a distorted guitar amp sounds kickass.

The perfect amp is the amp that reproduces the sounds faithfully. The rest should be handled in software. Sure if you want to distort your sound that's fine. Load this tube amp distortion profile.

A guitar amp isn’t reproducing sound - it’s making sound. The amp itself is an instrument being played by the guitarist.

The original posters general point wasn't only about guitar amps. I'm not disagreeing with their third sentence only with their first and second.

> amp that distorts audibly is not a good amp

Not true if you're a guitar player. (Of course, tube amp distortion can be modeled quite well digitally these days.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com