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Romy the Cat wrote:

The following two weeks was not juts a radical change in the fate of “Melquíades” but a revolutionary, completely radical turn over of all my believes about the capacity of entire sound reproduction, I am not kidding. I am not trying overly dramatize the events and the results that came next but they really turned my relationship with audio into a very new and very different coordinate system, and I never knew that it is possible to go in there. The “Melquíades” amp was exposed to slightly different expertise and the amp was slightly changed. Now, the “Melquíades” do not “sound” even remotely close or similar to how it sounded 2 weeks ago. How does it sound now?

So what happened during those “following two weeks”?

I have a friend of mind - Geoff Cook, an old school engineer with many radical and way out of mainstream views and experiences. He is a person who was one of the founders of so called High-End Audio engineering but then abandoned the audio field due to his luck of interest to interact with the idiocy and BS that this industry readily absorbs. Many his visions about sound reproduction helped me to shaped my view and to understand various technical aspects of sound reproduction. For instance the Melquíades uses the PS that was designed by me but that design was a direct consequence of countless hours when Geoff educated me how PS perform sonically and why it should be in one way or another. There are many other technical aspects that I intuitively implemented in Melquíades that were heavily influenced by the awareness that I bult up because of Geoff.

So, when I told to Geoff about the wonderful success I got with Melquíades he, after familiarizing with the circuit, suggested that there are many aspects of Melquíades that might be substantially improved. Interestingly that he informed me that those improvements have nothing to do with what I knew or with what is commonly understood as “audio quality”. He explained that there are very different ways of "engineering" thinking and if they applied then this amplifier might depart at the very different unknown to me level of listening experiences from Audio.

Geoff gave me some practical recommendation and some strategic direction to think and to experiment and left me to try. What he proposed was quite bizarre or I would say that it was certainly out of a typical way of thinking about the electrical circuit operation. I decided to try incrementally the Geoff’s topological changes within the Melquíades. At that time I did not know that the result would shake the performance of Melquíades with the force of hurricane that destroyed Macondo….

It took two days to implement Geoff’s idiosyncratic recommendations (it was not just a tweaking but an actual topological modification) and the very first seconds after I turned the amps on I did lost my virginity about my realization regarding of what amplifiers could do with Sound! It was not juts better or worse sound but it was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SOUND. Everything about this Sound was different, radically different and although I acknowledge that Sound instantaneously but it took for me days TO UNDERSTAND that Sound. The complexity of understanding of that Sound was that I never heard anything, even remotely similar, from any other amplifier or from any other playback system in my life. Interesting that all that knew about audio, and even considering my quite evolved audio vocabulary and creative semantics, was not able to describe the colossal leaps that newborn Melquíades took form any other amplifier. I spent a few hours listening in a complete disbelieve that such a level of reproduction is possible form a playback and then I called to Geoff. After I report him about the result he replied: “Well, I’ve been suggesting you that concept for 4 years and I was expecting this phone call”. Then he with the great details and precision described the sonic benefits that I got after his modifications and he was spot on. I felt completely mentally raped but I was grateful for an each second of the “ceremony”…

So, how the Melquíades sounds now?

Well, to explain the Melquíades sounds is the intention of this thread and I will continue in a few days when I got more time…

The Cat

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