Quote:
Originally Posted by audiomm
PJW ruffled a few feathers when he made that famous quote " all amplifiers sound the same provided they are competently designed and are run within the design parameters". I still have the articles from the HIFi comics when he put his money where his mouth was and arranged for blind tests to be conducted, using some of the HiFi fraternity as thelistening panel. The end result was that no-one was able to reliably pick any differences between the Quad II,303 or 405.
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I'm really interested in the details of this quote. I've seen it referred to lots of times, with various different wordings but I can't seem to nail down exactly what Peter Walker said and when he said it. As far as I can tell (I never met him) he seems to have been rather a careful speaker. I imagine he would never claim that the three amps below all sound the same, despite the fact that each one is 'competently designed' for the job in hand (very cheap domestic reproduction, robust PA use in a factory/club/village fete, top quality hifi). I own all three amps and even I, with my old cloth ears, can tell them apart. And even at low power their measured distortion levels are very different. So I suspect that what Peter Walker actually said was a bit more qualified. Can anyone point me to the definitive version ?
I'd also be interested in any references for listening tests. I already know of James Moir's article (Wireless World, Jul 78) where the three Quad amps were compared. The listening panel were anonymous but Moir describes them as "all well known and experienced listeners". However they didn't represent the entire spectrum of opinion. Moir described people who thought that transistor amplifiers always sound different from valve ones as belonging to a "cult". And he says of the listening panel "The cult members that were invited to take part in the tests accepted but subsequently withdrew ... ". So it might be argued that the people who stood the best chance of being able to distinguish between the amps (or, at least, believed that they did) had selected themselves out of the test.
I also know of the articles published later the same year (Hi-Fi News, Nov 78) by Martin Colloms and his colleagues, perhaps in response to Moir's original ? They also struggled to tell the difference between amplifiers in blind tests although they did, just about, manage it. But again I'd be grateful for references to any other 'scientific' tests .
To get back to the OP's original queries. I'm not sure that there really is a consensus opinion in the case of the Quad II vs the Quad 405 - there are adamant supporters and denigrators on each side. We do know what Peter Walker thought about transistor amps though. In Ken Kessler's book 'QUAD - The Closest Approach' he reports a 1994 interview with Peter Walker. A short extract reads:
KK:
At what point did you feel that transistors were acceptable for your amplifiers ?
PW: 1968. Prior to that you only had germanium transistors which didn't do high frequencies very well. They would blow up a bit and they weren't as good as valves. But in 1968 we could make a transistor amplifier as good or better than valves - not everybody believes that but there we are. That's what we thought.
KK:
But do you ever think back that, while the solid-state equipment measured very well, maybe it didn't sound as good as the valve equipment ?
PW: No. I think this going back to valves is partly fashion and partly the fact that you can make a valve amplifier fairly easily and it will always sound good. Transistor amplifiers are much more difficult to design and it's easy to make one that measures quite well but gives current overload and things go wrong like that, secondary breakdown and all sorts of things so it's not so easy. But if you make it properly and do all the measurements properly, and do all the proper listening tests, oh yes, then it's the right way to make an amplifier. It still is. The fashion for valves is, I think, just a fashion.
Cheers,
GJ