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Old 20th Jun 2021, 1:50 pm   #19
Jez1234
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Join Date: Mar 2021
Location: Morpeth, Northumberland, UK.
Posts: 936
Default Re: Quad II Transformer woes!

Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimJosef View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jez1234 View Post
All adequately designed amplifiers do not sound the same though! Even Quads II, 303 and 405 sound quite different from one another. I'm very familiar with the above articles and other similar ones BTW.
I agree. 'Sound' is a perception created in our brains. The brain takes inputs from many sources (that's what helps to keep animals with brains alive in environments where other animals fancy them as lunch). If our brains have any indication of which amp we're listening to then we'd have to damage them (the brains) very seriously indeed to stop that knowledge affecting the sound we hear.

Whether adequately designed amplifiers operating within their design limits produce distinguishable physical differences at our eardrums is a very different question. So far we have only come up with one generally accepted way of answering it, and that's with rigorously conducted, independently observed, double-blind testing. This is sufficiently hard to do properly that it's rarely carried out, but when it has been the people who insisted they could distinguish the amps turned out not to be able to. They were more surprised and shocked about this than anyone else.

Cheers,

GJ
I couldn't disagree more strongly. I cannot offer any explanations for the bizarre results of the Quad tests beyond those already extant from the time but you would have to be completely deaf for the difference between a Quad II and 405 not to be as obvious as the differences between many speakers.

FWIW I consider only a very few power amps to be truly excellent. Almost all fail at the subjective hurdles in one way or another.
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