Holographic imaging

In my experience, there's very little difference in the holographic abilities of tubes vs. SS. Listen for yourself and decide for yourself without regard to one technology vs. the other. Listen for the overall presentation, with your speakers, preferable in your room. When you find well designed equipment the differences will melt away.

Dave

Guys, for questions and user experiences with the H-Cat line stage I would merely direct you to the h-cat.com website. As Mr. Fiel suggests, I am enthusiastic about the H-Cat sound. I do not sell this equipment, while Mr. Fiel does sell rival equipment, but I have had 47 years of experience with audio equipment. Of course, your experience may differ from mine, but for many around the world have validated my experience with this product.

Ralph,
in reading you post I suspect that I probably have used the expression "bloom" wrongly. I thought bloom would be the air you hear around instruments in real life. Possibly "air" would have been the better word instead of bloom, although the sound blooms, spreads in an aura around the instrument that is played. This I find is most difficult to reproduce. The more transparency you get, where SS exells, the less air seems to be possible around the instruments. Digital, no matter how good it has become,is still disappointing as far as airiness is concerned. Harmonic distortion in tubes can mimic air to a certain degree. The first time I heard this, was with the old Jadis gear. It was pleasant but highly euphonic. Your gear has some air, but it seems to be neutral to my ear. Manley ( the son ) also seems to have had some measure of success in this field, as has the Wavac phono, which I have heard. However all these efforts are still far from real life and to my mind, this constitutes the biggest gap between the live event and our facsimilies. If I understand you right, "bloom" according to your definition would then always be the result of even order harmonic distortion in tubes. It sometimes mimics air to a certain degree, but it is basically something different.

I think that bloom is a natural event that occurs in real, acoustic music. Some might call it "air" but to me it's the overtones and ambiance of a live music scene or event. So a trumpet player plays a ringing high C, there's a "brrr" of the bell that's the overtones adding the trumpets characteristic edge to the sound and that's all mixed with the room reflections and other instruments.

Atmasphere seems to have chosen to define bloom as an artificial event, distortion. I think that bloom is just like frequency response, it can be accurate or not. Added bloom is unnatural and to be avoided, just like a hump in the frequency response at 60 hz is to be avoided. Both are inaccurate and both types of distortion can be euphonically pleasant in certain contexts.

As I've said before, IME, the best SS and tube components have very accurate imaging and get bloom and frequency response right. Some lesser equipment adds bloom and holography to get peoples attention, but it's not good in the long run for most of us. At the top of the heap, both tube and SS are very good in all these respects.

Dave

To me bloom is the same as harmonic richness. Bloom is not fat or warm per se. It is a highly complex (due to overtones) sound with texture. "Air" is the surrounding and expanding sound we generally don't hear in real life. I think air is an artifact of microphones. "Air" is not: ambient clues --> the diffuse reflected sound by hall acoustics and nearby structures. "Air" that appears like an "aura" is totally wrong! We don't hear such a thing in real life. You can hear this "aura" like phenomenon with the older Jadis units for example. Like Dave said: it is pretty but not very realistic (although some people are addicted to this "aura").

Chris