A couple days ago a local friend of mine asked to let him to listen my Celestion SL600 monitors:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=2500  (on the second page)

I brought to him the monitors with the stand (but with no LF section). The SL600 sounded like crap, very identicall to the sound of my Melquiades driving SL600. It was very obvious after the very first notes that his 50W PP A class B amp juts can not drive those speakers. It is not the issue of power but the fact that SL600, for whatever, reasons demand incredibly high QUALITY of amplification… Anyhow, I told him that if he promises to find a better amplifier then I will leave the SL600 in his room for a while, so I did… The guy didn’t disagree that his amplification was very poor but still he asked me why I feel that his amps were inadequate. I made an attempt to explain but while I was pooling out of my ass my bogus explanation I was wondering what the hell I was doing. I really do not know any explanation why some SS amps sound good or bad and pretty much anything that I’m capable to provide as “explanation” (even for myself) is completely fabricated. For instance I know very defiantly that an amplifier does very poor job but why do we (the peoples who juts USE audio) should care WHY the amp perform poorly? Yes, there are some very basic and very simplistic things: like amount of bias current relative to the load impedance but why we, THE USERS OF AUDIO, need to go further to understand how this damn amplifier works?

I think the reasons why we, THE AUDIO USERS, mistakably feel that the nuts and bolts of audio design is something that we should touch is the very same reason that brings so much evil in audio – the mediocrity  and stupidity of audio reviewing. Those people, the reviewers, year after year without having talent or skills to sell Sound, they force audio people to buy into a semi-technical justification “WHY SOUND SHOULD BE GOOD”. As the result a cretin-reviewer writes about among of capacitors, silverness of the cables or amount of flux  but at the same time he is falling give an objectives assessment of the actual Sound. The irony that even if a reviewer would try to say anything about sound (presumably that he would know “how”) then we the morons-readers would not understand him unless a reviewer will justify “the quality of sound” by some kind irrelevant technical fact.

We, the people who use audio, really do not need to know all those night and bolt – we juts ride horses, we as not veterinarians, and we do not need to know the acidneed of the horn’ stomach in order to ride her. A couple weeks back I stopped by at auto-dealer to buy a car. The sale- guy told me a long story about the amount of titanium in the car’s engine, the exclusive torch generation algorithm and unique weight distribution. I suggested him to shut up because nether I not him have any idea or interest what these words means. After driving test, the car was driving very poorly. So, where all that glorified “torch” gone?

The point that I’mtrying to make is that we really need to define for ourselves what we are interesting in audio: do we shovel technologies and try to fit them for our demands or we just try to fulfill our demands without any regards to technologies… After all - when you buy a car that drives as you expected… DO YOU REALLY CARE HOW IT WAS DONE? Do we really need to know about the “uniqueness” of the speaker’s drivers if the speakers sound like shit? Do you really need to know about the benefits if a given amplifier topology if from the sound of this amplifier the cactuses desiccate….

Perhaps if the audio – reviewing Morons would self-impose a ban to writhe up bogusness about irrelevant technology then perhaps the entire possess of reviewing would be different. Last year I asked a guy who occasionally write reviews if he think to abandon to write in his review about that irrelevant pseudo-techno-crap and he replied “what else to write about?”

We, the used do not need explanation, he need a “black box” with demanded performance.  If we, the users begin to wonder about differences between bipolar vs. MOSFETS, Bessel vs. Butterworth or cathode bias vs. self-bias then the people who furnish us with solutions of the people who critique this solution do very piss-poor job and they should be thrown out.

Dominic wrote:

… i think there's something to be said for the 'black box with demanded performance'. in fact i used to come at it from that very angle, somehow expecting i could try everything to see if it had the demanded performance. …

Actually there's something else to be said for the “black box with demanded performance”.

The “demanded performance” is not something that might be “observed” but something that should be expressed. Let me explaine. The “demanded performance” has nothing to do with personal tastes, inclination or preference. The “demanded performance” of playback it is juts a “pointer” (speaking on IT lingo) within a scale of “real fidelity” of musical perception. Therefore when we talk about the “demanded performance” we are talking about the level of a manufacture AND a level of a consumer to understand where this “pointer” is located.

The demanded level always exists. The question is how far the demanded level moves up. The higher the demanded level moves the more generic and more unified the requirements are. When a playback is implemented according to high-end requirements (in ideal) then the “demanded performance level” should be in fact a common denominator that is absolutely equal among everyone.

This is bigger problems: a consumer in it’s evolvement (no restrictions) might reach a level where all people “who already there” end up with (the same identical demands). However, it is very difficult, practically imposable for manufacturers (there are objective reasons why). This is why I feel that a “demanded performance” is very frequently is not that might be “observed” but something that should be expressed – it is way more complicated for the makers to express then for us “to recognize”.

We have .5% among audio listeners who actually have any signs of listening intelligence. We have the same percentage of people who has listening intelligence among the audio makers. Then we have probably .1% of all High-end audio listeners who become audio maker, and it is very much not the best .1%. So, we have very limited chance that an audio maker understands any stratification of “demanded performance”. Not to mention that, as “Drdna” very correctly point out, most of the manufactures has very short productive lifespan and with literally a couple years they  get converted form idealistic people who would like to do “better audio” into crap manufacturing disposable commodity of audio industry…

Paul S wrote:

So what are we to make of a product like the ML2 amps (using them here only as an example, not a topic)?  I have to say I more or less took a flyer on these, since I never heard them in a system I could stand before I up and bought them, and I well knew in advance the limits and limitations of SETs topological terms.  But now that I have them in my own system they don't sound like any SETs I have heard before.  In fact, they don't sound much like any amps I have heard before in terms of character.  And this raises lots of questions for me in terms of my "knowledge" about hi-fi electronic genres, since I am not sure in a technical sense what makes this amp so special.  OTOH, it has to be "something", and I do plan to figure it out as I listen. While I can't argue with the observation that we "don't know what sounds good", I can observe for myself that Romy took some ideas from the ML2s (and, no doubt, other electronic stuff) when he "deduced" the Melquiades, which are, after all, an amalgamation of memories, both memories of sound and memories of electronics with which Romy has formed associations. So here is another case for knowing something about the workings of the gear. Even if it does not solve the question of "circuit supremacy" it does suggest both the existence and value of a "working knowledge" of the gear. It appears to me that the "problem" is not so much with knowledge of electronics, per se, but rather with current evaluative methods and methodologies and the developmental processes stemming from these methods and methodologies.  Basically, there seems to be a disconnect between what we know about electronics and what we hear, and how we use what we hear to change what we "know" about electronics. It has long seemed to me that those who know the most about electronics, per se, are different people than those who know the most about music, per se.  Yet it has also been clear for some time that it takes more than a melding of both interests to render good hi-fi. But learning to listen is not just a technique, it is a process.  And likely the "knowledge" of hi-fi must transform itself on both fronts, listening and knowledge about the workings of the gear and how that relates to what we hear. I am reluctant to let go of the idea that I can keep track of what sounds right to me.  I would rather expand my knowledge than adopt a random approach borne of dispair of knowledge.

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=550

However, it was my ways and it certainly not the only way. I come to high-end audio with a certain baggage of prerequisites and with certain amount of margins. In my case the ML2 was a useful schooling.

it is important to understand that when we learns anything in audio we do not really take in and embrace the new things but rather discover the “correct” answers with ourselves. We do have all answers built in within us and all that we need to do it juts to find the patterns according to winch out consciousness could dig the “realizations” out. It is not about knowing “what sounds good" but rather having within ourselves a keys to the mechanisms that would allow to objectively asses how our inner-us react to different sonic irritations… It is just about honesty, sensitivity, own sense of values and ability to extrapolate the views creatively via external metaphoric symbolism (sound in the given case).