Originally Posted by
Marco
Hi Rob,
Lol – I’m glad that you have for a change! Don’t be scared to upset the 'resident faithful'. We like lively debates here on AoS! ;)
I’m sure that they did, but it doesn’t mean that such listening influenced the design process, which is what was of concern to me.
I suspect that any mastering would’ve been done using the solid-state Quad studio or broadcast amps of the day, and not Quad IIs. Heaven forbid, for the sake of accuracy, if it was the latter!
I have no beef with the 303 or 405, as they are different designs.
However, as far as I’m concerned, you cannot build a 'musically accurate' amplifier (i.e. that whose sound is genuinely musically convincing, since the end goal, after all, is to reproduce realistic and believable sounding instruments and voices, through a hi-fi system, by faithfully replicating, as closely as possible, the musical nuances of the source audio signal), without LISTENING to equipment as well as measuring it, during the design process.
It’s an amplifier’s ability to accurately reproduce those all-important nuances and subtleties, and not simply gloss over them, which to our ears, makes it musically convincing, and separates it from one which is merely accurate, up to a point, at reproducing the source music signal. Quite simply, our ears will readily detect the absence of those nuances, which test apparatus will likely have missed (as I do not believe that we can currently measure ALL that we can genuinely hear in audio), and thus will cause us to feel that the reproduced sound isn't 'real'.
In my view, relevant measurements aside, and taken as a given, only when equipment is then judiciously voiced by ear, by someone who genuinely understands music, and all its inherent complexities, does one faithfully capture those all-important musical nuances (depending on how good the ears are of the designer in question), which I have referred to above, quite simply because the technical limitations of our test equipment results in us currently being unable to measure all that needs measuring with music signals, in order to ascertain, with the sound of equipment, what is actually real (or rather as close to real as possible) and what is merely a competent copy of the source music signal.
As an aside, and I’m sorry to say it, but it pains me to read some of the absolutist stuff that Serge Auckland writes on pfm on this subject. He’s a nice enough chap, undoubtedly, but severely deluded if he genuinely believes that any audio equipment is *genuinely* sonically transparent. If only it were! Incidentally, Serge is most welcome to join and defend his views; in fact I would invite him to do precisely that, as it would no doubt make for an interesting debate, albeit it would most likely end in us agreeing to disagree.
I believe that there is no such thing as (genuinely) sonically transparent audio equipment. In my view, ALL audio equipment imparts its own sonic signature, subtly or otherwise on proceedings, by the very nature of the signal having to pass though a multitude of electronic components, wire and/or PCBs, all of which to some degree affect its integrity, and thus colours the music reproduced by the equipment in question, although none of this is likely to show up on our current test equipment. To be blunt, you’re in cloud cuckoo-land if you think that your favourite amp (or whatever) is sonically transparent...
I mean, let's get real, how can both Quad IIs and, say, the Quad 303 be considered as sonically 'transparent' or 'accurate' when they both sound different?? Yet both were presumably designed by Peter Walker to be "technically faithful to the input", such was his mantra, (and I could cite many examples of the same with equipment from other manufacturers). What's going on there, then? :scratch:
The answer, of course, is that neither amp qualifies as being genuinely transparent, as every amplifier made to date on this planet, valve or transistor, imparts its own sonic signature on reproduced music, in varying degrees of subtlety. Therefore, when assembling our hi-fi systems, all we can ultimately do is choose our preferred form of coloration, whether it be valve or transistor-derived, and enjoy our music through it on that basis. Genuine transparency in audio equipment is but a pipe dream!
But a music signal is a very different thing from a noise or test tone signal.
Just because an amplifier ensures that what appears at the output matches that on the input in all but magnitude at audible frequencies, doesn’t automatically mean that it will succeed at accurately reproducing the source music signal.
The goal with music reproduction via audio equipment, after all, is to accurately reproduce MUSIC (not noise or test tones), which is probably why Quad IIs fundamentally fail at the former, and what happens when you don’t actually listen to the equipment you build! :doh:
The problem is that "technically faithful to the input" can, in reality, mean a very different thing to being (genuinely) faithful to the source music signal.....
The way I do it is embrace the fact that no piece of audio equipment or system can ever be truly 100% musically transparent or accurate, and simply choose components and build a system, which to my ears, best replicates the sound of real instruments and voices, based on my (extensive) experience of listening to them live. Therefore, from my listening experience to date, I intrinsically *know* how things should sound - and I'm far from alone in being able to do this.
Live, un-amplified, music is the benchmark I use to test my system against, and so I need no 'measurement apparatus', other than my brain and the God-given organs attached to the sides of my head (known as ears) in order to assess whether, on that basis, my system sounds musically convincing.
Well, if you’ve re-inflated it, I’ve probably just gone and burst it!! :lol:
Over to you now, mate.... ;)
Marco.
