Douglas Self on Negative feedback and distortion


I've been reading Douglas Self book on amplifier design and something he said that really makes me think twice.

As you have seen most amplifier makers claim that their amps either does not use global NFB at all or very little of it to improve dynamic (or transient response).

According to Self, the only parameter that matters is distortion and nothing else. I supposed he measures the extra harmonics that the amp produces given a sinusoidal input. In other words, distortion is measured in the frequency domain.

If I remember correctly in my Control Theory course way back in my college days, the frequency domain reponse cannot tell how the amp will response for a given step input. And the STEP RESPONSE is what can tell a lot about the behavior of an amp dynamic and transient response.

In his book, he is very adamant about his position that the only thing that matters is the amp frequency response.

I don't thing frequency response contains information about how any amp would respond to a step input but I could be wrong. Frequency response is only a steady state behavior of the amp. It cannot tell how much the amp would over-shoot, under-shoot, tendency to ringing, and so and so, given a step response. I don't think you can look at the frequency response and make any conclusion about the amp tendency to overshoot, undershoot, ringing and so on...

What do you think?

By the way, I think his book is excellent read into the theory an amplifier design if you can ignore some of his more dogmatic position.
andy2

Showing 4 responses by marakanetz

You're right,
The control theory states that negative feedback MAINLY exists to keep amplifier stable.
An amplifier at the same time can have multiple stages of amplifications which we also can consider as an amplifiers.
A global negative feedback i.e. over the whole amplifier not only should exist to decrease distortions over the larger freequency bandwidth but to prevent an amp from self-oscillations.
Hammy,
If you carefully read specs of cheap 100W Yamaha you'll realize that distortion level is measured at 1kHz @1W of output power. Whatever reaches 100W you may only assume what kind of junk you're realy getting. Normally this cheap Yamaha will be in OK shape upto 20W.
Hammy,
and you're missing mine:
The one that truely specs out great MUST sound great.
If the one that specs out great and doesn't sound great it means the specs are NOT true.
Nowdays specs mean completely NOTHING unless you're purchasing a professional equipment.
The marketing assumption is that consumer is dumb, therefore needs nothing to know about specs.