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Re: More answers

Lower order distortion products are easier for listeners to integrate into the intended listening experience, partly because they have analogues, if you will, with real world phenomena that hearing mechanisms have evolved to deal with.

When you start dealing with higher order distortion products (both harmonic and intermodulation) produced by an amplifier, especially with feedback, there are no longer ear/brain processing mechanisms available to integrate them, they tend to be more prominent where hearing acuity is greatest, and they are increasingly associated with a multiplicity of spectral components both in the original signal, and produced yet are still strongly correlated with the source signal, thus are drastically more detectable as various forms of sonic degradation.

High levels of feedback invite momentary internal signal overloads as the feedback attempts to correct particularly when the signal is not strongly band limited and especially when out of band noise is introduced such as with RF, clock noise with DSP, power supplies, Class D amps, noise products from AC line, etc. In a well controlled test environment, these factors are of course reduced or eliminated, so high feedback gets a bit of a free pass on the test bench.

See my other post about transistor amplifiers' problems with the 'first watt'.

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  • Re: More answers - Tom Dawson 15:09:41 12/22/05 (0)
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