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

goffkait

" I'm afraid they've run out of options trying to somehow improve upon the current model. More designers must think outside the box."

That's whats happening for sure. There is only so much tweaking you can do to a given amp or preamp design. You have to go outside the box to get new ideas to try. Unfortunately most designers have given up looking for that "new" circuit that will give them the best results possible.

I saw a video of Robert Harley (TAS) interviewing a panel of the top audio designers at an audio show in 2015. It was very interesting but the last question had a response that honestly I did not expect. He (Harley) asked them "Do you think we will ever be able to reproduce the live experience in music?"

The answer from all members on the panel was the same - "no". This tells me that these designers have hit a brick wall in their designs - sort of like writers block. 

This is why I felt it was necessary years ago to take a different approach. I needed to bypass that brick wall by simply using an entirely different approach. If you step back and take a look at the sound reproduction process and you had no idea where to begin - you have to boil it down to the least number of steps. First you want to capture the live acoustic event as performed in the hall.  Then you want to release or playback the copy into your listening room. If it is a perfect copy (like a clone) it will transfer all of the attributes of the original performance including the belief that the performance is happening now (live)

The problem is that the best you can experience, or record, is a subtle loss of transient function, so... likened to a master tape copy.. slightly darker, slightly duller, slightly slower. light recording has the same issues, or of a similar type of issue. the eye has limits, the ear has limits the recording mediums and devices have limits.

They would have to be entirely non interactive to suffer no loss. Quantum function in a mass aggregate classical analysis, ie a temporal medium says... that losses of some sort are the best we can do. Thermodynamics and quantum function in the interactive says losses are the best you can do. Brownian motion in the mass aggregate and interactive is part of it, one might conclude.

If you find it is the same or more detail than that, then it’s a lie, a falsification. (And we don’t need another aphex aural exciter)

This is how we end up with screechy systems that drive people out of the room, with their ’detail’. Cringeworthy audio systems, they can be.

The only way I found I could help, is to re-write the rules and methods of electrical transfer, so as to avoid the pitfalls of complex impedance in AC systems and how this signal or intelligence interacts with the solids, the lattice network solidus matter.

To go to a conductive fluid medium at the true molecular level, which acts more like a gas and less like a fluid, when subjected to transient functions or high delta. We get a response characteristic that is more like a gas/plasma medium under those transient functions of signal interaction. (delta as mass, or how a tiny bullet can explode a brick--as it’s moving very fast..kinetics also enter the foray. Very messy math. We can idealize it but we can’t really calculate it)

Thus the signal and carrier are more like ’one’ (plasma) which is as ideal as it will ever get, when it comes to removing the losses and masking inherent in complex impedance, how such damages signal. the point is that in a plasma, the impedance is dynamic and is of the signal itself. The metallic fluid at the molecular level and audio signals...takes you there... not all the way...but..enough.

It’s not perfect but it is a magnitude beyond wire.

The loss of the noise, signal slurring, and masking of complex impedance when it (signal) interacts with wire, this makes some think the fluid metal is ’dark’ sounding with no detail, when all it is doing... is losing the additive/subtractive noise aspect that people have lived with (fundamental to their entire idea of hearing and audio) since the very dawn of wire based electrical technology.

Other people..they report gobs and gobs of detail they never heard before, but with warmth and speed, unrivaled speed and dynamic attack. Ie, previously obscured harmonic complexity tied to transient function, both delivered clearly. Read any of the reports and they will all say these exact things.

But it does not have the falsified detail that is inherent in all wire - which has inherent complex LCR issues in the transient domain (high delta).

We humans hear by transient function.... so this matters, this is everything, the whole enchilada.

This is about a reset at the base level of audio and how we’ve learned to hear. Some get it, some don’t.

A tough haul under the best of conditions and mindsets.

@roger_paul 

Again, what on earth are you talking about? What kind of "thinking outside the box" are you expecting? To date humanity has invented a few variations on 2 basic gain devices and there's 3 ways you can use those gain devices. That gives you a limited number of basic topologies to arrange in some fashion. Are you trying to say we need to invent some kind of completely new gain device? Are amps just not being built with enough hyper-complicated gain stages? You speak as if electronics designers are wizards with mystic powers who've just given up. What exactly do you expect?

kosst_amojan

"To date humanity has invented a few variations on 2 basic gain devices and there's 3 ways you can use those gain devices. That gives you a limited number of basic topologies to arrange in some fashion"

This is true and pretty much sums up conventional thinking. This is exactly what I had to break away from. You see those devices and see their limitations. I see the same devices and I see unlimited uses.
What if there was a fourth way to use them? Now that would be outside the box. 

Ever heard of an amplifier with automatic focus?