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In the Forum: Melquiades Amplifier
In the Thread: Single-stage Melquiades vs. DHT amps

Post Subject: The Wine Via the Wine GlassPosted by Paul S on: 11/30/2008

I just had a thought about wine tasting and how I would prefer not to approach a Grand Cru wine without my "special", quite large wine glass. I look back on all the great wine I +/- "wasted" over the years by drinking it with "normal" glasses, and I can say with certainty that I get a LOT more from wine these days because of the glass, and also because I know how to use the glass to get more of what the wine has to offer. I realize that some people like to use a different style of glass for every type of wine, but I do not do it this way. Rather, I find that I can vary somewhat the way I use my one "special" glass to make the most of any decent wine. The glass inevitably has a shape, of course, but I can effectively vary that shape by the way I hold it, etc. I do not think its own taste or scent are issues, and I certainly would not want them to be.

The idea of the hi-fi system for me is to extract, +/- "gather" and make available as much of the music as I can get from the source, and I refine the results by a sort of tuning that might vary with any number of variables on a specific occasion, with given material and under particular circumstances. Still, the idea of "pre-conditioning" the sound in any irrevocable way has never appealed to me; quite the contrary.

The idea of the "simplest" circuit has a very strong pull, in and of itself. And the idea is vindicated according to the extent that it serves its purpose. That purpose is another subject, but of course it cannot be dismissed either in looking forward or in looking back with respect to a given implementation.

No question in my mind that I would at least try 1-stage amps, if I had the speakers for it. And, practically speaking, that is a very big IF.

Given speakers that can be driven dynamically by single stage amplification, there remain a host of issues, and among those issues is color. Most compression drivers are color-challenged to begin with, and most audiophile sources are keleidoscopic, meaning that if they can do a "wide range of colors", then they just strew them around like handfulls of confetti or, just as bad, like some freakishly painted sculpture garden experienced on acid.

Every man for himself when it comes to solving all the problems, but I think it makes it easier to look first to the un-avoidable colorations generated by sources and speakers and then try to make the most of what we're stuck with, not so much by adding colorations but by making other components as transparent as possible; which, it seems to me, might be another way of saying that other components can be as "neutral" as possible to good effect. Whether this leads us to 1-stage, 2-stage, 3-stage or PP amplification is going to be very system-dependent, of course, but I would hope no one is trying to add missing colors at the amp stage.

Best regards,
Paul S

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