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Re: More breaking news!

Quote from Nelson Pass's First Watt website: "All other things being equal, a simpler circuit sounds better. So does an amplifier with little or no feedback."

"Class A operation results in higher quality than the other classes, and is well suited to simple low power amplifiers, partly because it has lower overall distortion and partly because the distortion is "monotonic" where the distortion decreases with level."

This is his current thinking on amplification. Who cares what he was doing when he first got out of college as a "trained" engineer in the 1960s and early 70s.

From the F3 description: "That’s only the beginning. The JFET has much less distortion operated as if it were a MOSFET, but it’s not a MOSFET, and it has characteristics which allow for even better performance.

When we look at the anode (or tube plate) voltage curves for devices we see what I would call the “triode character” and the “pentode character”."

From the F3 owners manual: "The better the parts the simpler the circuit can be. The more subtle the circuit design, the more you get out of the parts, and the better the sound.

Simplicity not only reduces the number of parts that the sound has to go through, it requires design that maximizes the linearity of each gain stage and minimizes feedback."

Of course in a simple design the character of the amplifying device becomes very important.

You see, Nelson cares about the device characteristics and the distortion they make. Since he is a widely reverred designer then I guess that would make such information relevant.

Of course when you build bog standard textbook circuits with 30+ db of negative feedback then you will get a more or less standard sound (ie. not very good). You are probably right that then the device doesn't matter very much but that is your flaw from the beginning, relying on negative feedback to cure inherently grossly non-linear circuits.



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