Has anyone heard the new North American products preamp and amp?

I don't think any distortion would be introduced but one might hear it less precise in location.

Tbg wrote,

"I have said all that I understand about this revolution. Listen for yourself."

One more question: once the signal leaves the amplifier it still needs to get to the speakers.  The speaker cables introduce additional velocity differences in the signal since the high frequencies travel closer to the surface of the conductor where the resistance is less, no?

It seems that the worst offender of the velocity errors is the power amp.
It may be because it has the task of converting the electrical wave into an acoustic wave via the transducers (speakers).

As you may know sometimes the IC connections can become "dirty" or poor and when you reconnect them or clean them up it restores the transparency and focus to your presentation.

That is the result of fixing a "poor" connection. The destructive nature of the poor connection represents a non-linear event in the chain. It does not take much of a non-linearity to scramble location information, etc.

By having a power amp that does not contain a non-linear path it keeps the purity of the chain much higher and allows the positive and negative wave-fronts to stay registered. (needed if you hope to hear live).

Roger
 

Let’s take a look for a moment at what kind of errors you’re actually talking about here. We know that the velocity of the audio signal in copper wire is some high percentage of the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Let’s say for argument’s sake the frequency with the highest velocity travels at 75% of the speed of light, or 139,500 miles per second. Now, suppose there are differences in velocities depending on frequency. How much different are the velocities? 5%? 10% 30%? Let’s take the largest number for the sake of argument. Thus, 70% of 3/4 of the speed of light is the velocity of the slowest frequency within the audio signal. That's our assumption. Which happens to be actually another big number. A huge number, in fact.  98,000 miles per second. Anyone care to take a guess how long it takes a signal traveling at 98,000 miles per second to traverse the circuits in an amplifier? Compared to say room anomalies and phase errors produced by speaker crossovers and differences in velocities inside the amp seem extremely inconsequential, if I can be so bold. Of course, you might be correct and your amp might be the biggest thing since Skippy Chunky Peanut Butter. It’s just not obvious why.

geoffkait,

One more question: once the signal leaves the amplifier it still needs to get to the speakers.  The speaker cables introduce additional velocity differences in the signal since the high frequencies travel closer to the surface of the conductor where the resistance is less, no?

This is an excellent question that I'm glad you asked.
The difference is that one is a non-symmetrical phase error and the other is a symmetrical phase error.

Symmetrical phase errors are tolerable because they "screw up" the positive and negative wavefronts identically. while it is not ideal it won't modify the location of an object the way that a non-symmetrical phase error can.

A  non-symmetrical phase error can alter the phase more on one of the pos/neg wavefronts which will introduce velocity errors (the positive wavefront may arrive faster (sooner) than the negative wavefront)
This puts a constant wrinkle in the time domain.

So in the case of your speaker wire.Indeed high frequencies travel closer to the surface (skin effect) but this happens equally to signals traveling in both directions .

In an active stage. The likelihood of a non-symmetrical phase error created by a non-linear event injects what looks like a poor connection into the chain.

The connection will lean towards a diode effect meaning it conducts better in one direction than the other. This phenomenon will always cause the location information to be scrambled or diffused and the holographic view to collapse.

Roger