Are future improvements in Amp/PreAmps slowing to a crawl?

Hey Ralph,

the liquid metal cable is all about re-writing the ground that electricity walks on. As fundamental a mental shift as can ever be. From the molecular and quantum levels, on up. Hardcore and real.

However, it’s a difficult thing for most people to understand has even taken place.

It’s a dancing bear that dances a lot like wire but is not even remotely the same. At all.

Can it do better than wire/solidus in it’s application in audio signals? Most definitely so. Can people relate to those changes and upturns in qualities they desire? (the human question is more complex than that, though)

Some do, some don’t. Top people in various fields ’get it’, immediately. Pundits on forums?... sometimes...not so much.

Hey, todd, thanks.  That's more or less what I'd assumed....I remember Audio Control or a company of a similar name had fielded a line of T amps; one could buy one standalone or a group of them that could be mounted into a common chassis (which was more or less a rack to encase them).  They came and went rather quickly...I guess they were either too far ahead of their time to be taken seriously or just got hammered by the pundits.  I was attracted by the concept, but wasn't in a situation to pull the trigger on them.

I may have been lucky or broke at the right time. *L*

But I hear and see the feathers being rustled by the factions already here....*wince*

C'mon, y'all.  Tubes and the 'typical solid state' are not going to vaporize any time soon.  The alphabet soup of amp types will be around for quite awhile, certainly long after the bulk of the readers here will have gone off to greener pastures...under grade level, but that's another issue for another sort of forum.  Any and all adherents will have their 'favs' tweaked to the nth degree.  D at some point will get superseded by E, F, and whatever quantum audio will look and sound like.

As was said by a wag sharper than I:

"The Future: Live it, or live with it."

It ain't going to go away, and it'll be here soon enough. ;)  Be patient, or ignore as best you can. *G*

Like it or not, there are a good number of people who will never give class D a chance and I'm one of them. Class D is rife with problems and even the very best class D amps divide people in real decisive ways. The gold standard is class A and nobody has come close to building a class D amp that touches the qualities of class A. Even the very best draw very mixed opinions. Amplifiers are art. Every amplifier imparts distortion with some character. For those of us accustomed to low order distortion imparted by simple topologies using as few gain stages as possible, class D isn't even on our radar. 

'The end of science' bit in the title is mostly journalistic license in designing a hook for the article.

Nelson speaks on some of this via:

The other fundamental thing—number 2—is that I am centrally aware that all this is just entertainment, mine and yours. The objective needs of amplifier users are largely solved on a practical level, and as [Marshall] McLuhan perceptively noted, when that happens, we turn our technology into art. For me, the art lies in making simple, unusual amplifiers that sound great and measure fairly well. They aren't for everyone, but if they appeal to even a narrow segment of audiophiles, I'm perfectly happy. I'm equally happy if they are reliable.
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/nelson-pass-circuit-topology-and-end-science#T473FqLttf7wgh1I.99

Thus not quite the end of science but an established science can head into being used in or as - art as commentary.

@kosst_amojan

The gold standard is class A and nobody has come close to building a class D amp that touches the qualities of class A. Even the very best draw very mixed opinions. Amplifiers are art. Every amplifier imparts distortion with some character. For those of us accustomed to low order distortion imparted by simple topologies using as few gain stages as possible, class D isn't even on our radar.

It may interest you to know that our tube amps are class A with only one stage of gain. It can't get a whole lot simpler than that.

And I've yet to hear a class D amp that can keep up. But it would be a mistake to simply write off class D. Its still on the steep part of the price/performance curve.