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One Amp To ‘Rule’ Them All....

Is there one amplifier that everyone can agree on as a contemporary standard? An amplifier that can be considered a standard in both the studio and in a home stereo setup?

What one amplifier does everything very well and can be found in homes and in professional audio engineering environments?

What amp covers all the bases and gives you a glimpse into all qualities of fine musical reproduction?

...something Yamaha? ...something McIntosh?

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michaelgreenaudio's avatar
michaelgreenaudio
643 posts
 

Hi Ray

"Go to trade shows and listen. It’s a journey and a lot of fun."

This is another topic that is of much importance right now.

What's going to happen to the HEA trade shows over the next few years will be interesting as the gas runs out of the "only a volume control" hobby comes to it's end. The realization that the professional world has been trying to gently help HEA with is finally breaking through the minds of the HEA audiophile.

When HEA should have turned right they turned left a drove way down a road that makes no sense. Now watching this vehicle try to politely turn around in the middle of traffic is going to be interesting to see.

Can I paint another picture for you guys?

What if you drove to the next HEA trade show and instead of walking into rooms where everything sounded different and there was only a volume control to adjust, you instead walked into rooms where you could sit down and make everything and every recording sound your way?

We could have made that move around the mid 90's, but even though we're slow as a hobby's people, we're making that move now. Now it's more a matter of how fast the conversion will take. The plug & play hobby is almost over. Enter the variable wars :)

mg

nutella
192 posts
 
To answer the OP's question, well it has already been answered several times.  The answer decisively is no.  That answer has been answered, demonstrated and proven in this very thread.
rodman99999
3,557 posts
 
@michaelgreenaudio- "What if you drove to the next HEA trade show and instead of walking into rooms where everything sounded different and there was only a volume control to adjust, you instead walked into rooms where you could sit down and make everything and every recording sound your way?" If everything sounded, "your way", wouldn’t that result in some VERY happy brain-waves? Like I said earlier, once someone like Lyngdorf manages to meld FFT/DSP(and their Room Perfect algorithms, for instance) with EEG, maybe. If someone can imagine it, tap into your Happy-Listening-Synapses and come up with the algorithm, why not? My TacT RCS 2.2(Boz was Lyngdorf’s old partner), with all of it’s room correction abilities, has enabled me to shape my sound, in a way that puts me in another venue and very happy. If this is possible via laptop keyboard(and TacT), why won’t it eventually be done via thought and some new device, like THIS: https://newatlas.com/mind-controlled-prosthetic-fingers/41886/ Then again, why not a direct feed, to your brain’s listening centers(who needs ears, anyway), or- a way to trigger a little extra Dopamine, whenever music’s playing, so everything sounds good, regardless? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-musical-self/201101/why-listening-music-makes-us-feel-g... Now, THAT would be really, "High-End"!
glupson
1,794 posts
 
"The plug & play hobby is almost over. Enter the variable wars :)"
Not everybody likes, or has time and attention span, to tweak and adjust. Some like to press the button and not think about it anymore. They are no worse than those who tweak to the end of the world. They just have different approach.

The end of "one volume control knob" era may be coming to an end, if there has ever been that era, but it may be just because of fashion cycles. A few decades ago, amplifiers had lots of shiny knobs, then less and less. It may be time for more. At the same time, real simple-to-use tweaks have been around for decades. They used to come with receivers. "Club", "Church", "Stadium", "Pop", "Rock", and what not. I have not checked receivers in a while, but cell phones/iPods/etc. have such modalities. Changing sound to suit someone's preference has been around, it is not due to the "end of HEA" now.

Wars are never a pleasant experience. Hopefully, variable is negotiable.
lukaske
72 posts
 
Ear, preamp and poweramp were used in the studio. Audio Note to.
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