ASR took the fun out of amp reviews

[ta240]

Stereophile just added a review of the Aurorasound HFSA-01 integrated amplifier which once upon a time, to me , would have been a really interesting product.

The problem is now I skip to the measurements in their reviews and it makes it hard to bother with their listening impressions. I'll readily admit that I have a soft spot for tubes and for a low powered tube amp getting to 8 watts with .1 distortion is pretty good.

but it is really hard to get past measurements like this:

How do people that claim they can hear the difference between cables manage to ignore all of that?

The review starts buy gushing about the build: "Lifting the lid unveils Karaki's artistry, which is evident in the pristine epoxy and copper-print circuit boards; its precise wiring with premium Furukawa Electric and Beamex wire; and ceramic and gold-plate tube sockets"

And then after the glowing review of all the care taken in the build he theorizes as to what is causing all the noise: "The spuriae at 60Hz and its odd-order harmonics are due to magnetic interference from the power transformer". What good does fancy wire and gold plated tube sockets do when the power transformer is too close to key components?

It isn't like someone already had a case sitting around, so they used it to build an amp and ended up with noise, they designed and built this thing from scratch. For $3600 they could have made the case larger and added some shielding at the side of the transformer.

This is exactly what bugs me when people say "tube sound" because for way too many, this is what that is. It isn't the harmonics sounding pleasant to them, it is the noise reaching audible levels.

 

[rdenney]

And yet those spuriae, at -80 dB, are probably too low for most people to hear, except that most people will overdrive this amplifier to get a usable sound out of it. From the first chart, harmonic distortion will be 20 dB greater than the power-supply spurs at the very low full power, and that distortion will spike as the amp clips, which it surely will with anything like conventional speakers in a conventional room. And if the user has to find speakers with 110 dB/W/m sensitivity to make enough sound to be worth the trouble, those power-supply spuriae might suddenly become audible at 50 dB SPL. For playing background music using conventional speakers two feet from the listener on a desktop, though, all that might be fine.

(But, yes, I agree with your point.)

Rick "didn't read the review" Denney

 

[dedobot]

Measurements are the least of problem in this thing. It's dangerous. . Look at high current wires pressed between the case and psu !

 

[AdamG]

Blind Faith is a powerful thing. The desire to fit in is also a powerful thing. Our brains can make us believe just about anything is real or possible if we decide beforehand that we want to feel/see/participate in the delusion/illusion. For one of the best examples of how powerful the brain can be. Do some research on the Medical development of the “Placebo” effect. Once intrenched in a particular dogma it becomes nearly impossible to break free.

Placebo in history - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[SSS]

Stereophile just added a review of the Aurorasound HFSA-01 integrated amplifier which once upon a time, to me , would have been a really interesting product.

The problem is now I skip to the measurements in their reviews and it makes it hard to bother with their listening impressions. I'll readily admit that I have a soft spot for tubes and for a low powered tube amp getting to 8 watts with .1 distortion is pretty good.
View attachment 433988
but it is really hard to get past measurements like this:
View attachment 433987
How do people that claim they can hear the difference between cables manage to ignore all of that?

The review starts buy gushing about the build: "Lifting the lid unveils Karaki's artistry, which is evident in the pristine epoxy and copper-print circuit boards; its precise wiring with premium Furukawa Electric and Beamex wire; and ceramic and gold-plate tube sockets"
View attachment 433986
And then after the glowing review of all the care taken in the build he theorizes as to what is causing all the noise: "The spuriae at 60Hz and its odd-order harmonics are due to magnetic interference from the power transformer". What good does fancy wire and gold plated tube sockets do when the power transformer is too close to key components?

It isn't like someone already had a case sitting around, so they used it to build an amp and ended up with noise, they designed and built this thing from scratch. For $3600 they could have made the case larger and added some shielding at the side of the transformer.

This is exactly what bugs me when people say "tube sound" because for way too many, this is what that is. It isn't the harmonics sounding pleasant to them, it is the noise reaching audible levels.

Agree. For me it is a mechanical bad assembly of the components. Output transformers magnetical in-line with the power transformer. Already 100 years ago this was known misdesign. Cables unter the PC boards, bad. One PC board near the power transformer, very bad. All this can be made much better than this example.

 

[mhardy6647]

PC boards -- be they pristine epoxy and copper or otherwise -- and vacuum tubes (especially HV rectifiers and power output tubes) are, in general* and I'd opine, a bad combination.


_____________
* Remember: all generalizations are false, including this one.

 

[Thomas Savage]

There's nothing like leaving a dodgy tube amp on all day , the rush of anticipation and nervous energy when returning from work wondering if the house has burnt down or not ..

Alas , iv seen worse than this , looks safe at least , how dull .

Il just take a software plug in or not .

 

[Old_School_Brad]

Blind Faith is a powerful thing. The desire to fit in is also a powerful thing. Our brains can make us believe just about anything is real or possible if we decide beforehand that we want to feel/see/participate in the delusion/illusion. For one of the best examples of how powerful the brain can be. Do some research on the Medical development of the “Placebo” effect. Once intrenched in a particular dogma it becomes nearly impossible to break free.

Placebo in history - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And I think this is the same mechanism that makes old habits difficult to break.
Fascinating and thought-provoking.

 

[dedobot]

Blind Faith is a powerful thing. The desire to fit in is also a powerful thing. Our brains can make us believe just about anything is real or possible if we decide beforehand that we want to feel/see/participate in the delusion/illusion. For one of the best examples of how powerful the brain can be. Do some research on the Medical development of the “Placebo” effect. Once intrenched in a particular dogma it becomes nearly impossible to break free.

Placebo in history - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes its must to be known. Few days ago an fella posted in lp-unf thread about vocal distortion in his speakers. I replied no such thing in my set. After I listened some youtube examples of vocal distortion and of course I started hear the distortion in my lpunf..more and more. Just stopped listening music this day to give time of my poor brain to "reboot' . Next day at morning the "distortion" was gone.

 

[evanft]

That looks like it could have been a DIY project.

 

[dedobot]

That looks like it could have been a DIY project.

I will add "noob DIY lacking respect of electricity ".

 

[Saponetto]

Not a real problem.
Noob DYI-ers (like myself...) very ofter tend to self-terminate themselves due the B+ presence.
(Just kidding... )

 

[Multicore]

I guess the experience of "fun" in Stereophile amp review texts is a subjective thing.

When we were in the market for new gear for the living room in 2018 and 2019 my knowledge of the market was badly out of date and I tried to do some research. I read reviews on Stereophile but really couldn't make much sense out of it. I remember reading a writer called Herb Reichert and finding the writing quite funny. I remember reading this:

Gramophone Dreams #33: Interconnects & Loudspeaker Cables

When I applied for this job, I wrote a pretend review of the Rogue Audio Sphinx integrated amplifier and emailed it to Stephen Mejias, then Stereophile's deputy editor, who printed it and put it on John Atkinson's desk. Before I sent it to Stephen, I showed a rough draft to my business agent...

www.stereophile.com

Hilarious but the texts were usually uninformative about the performance and practical value of equipment. I could make no sense at all of the descriptions of subjective experience. None. My amusement turned to frustration. Luckily I found my way here in 2019 and was then able to much more quickly and confidently evaluate the various claims of audiophile writers and the technobabble of audio sales staff. With my physics/EE schooling and engineering career, the language spoken here is much easier for me to follow.

 

[AdrianusG]

Stereophile just added a review of the Aurorasound HFSA-01 integrated amplifier which once upon a time, to me , would have been a really interesting product.

The problem is now I skip to the measurements in their reviews and it makes it hard to bother with their listening impressions. I'll readily admit that I have a soft spot for tubes and for a low powered tube amp getting to 8 watts with .1 distortion is pretty good.
View attachment 433988
but it is really hard to get past measurements like this:
View attachment 433987
How do people that claim they can hear the difference between cables manage to ignore all of that?

The review starts buy gushing about the build: "Lifting the lid unveils Karaki's artistry, which is evident in the pristine epoxy and copper-print circuit boards; its precise wiring with premium Furukawa Electric and Beamex wire; and ceramic and gold-plate tube sockets"
View attachment 433986
And then after the glowing review of all the care taken in the build he theorizes as to what is causing all the noise: "The spuriae at 60Hz and its odd-order harmonics are due to magnetic interference from the power transformer". What good does fancy wire and gold plated tube sockets do when the power transformer is too close to key components?

It isn't like someone already had a case sitting around, so they used it to build an amp and ended up with noise, they designed and built this thing from scratch. For $3600 they could have made the case larger and added some shielding at the side of the transformer.

This is exactly what bugs me when people say "tube sound" because for way too many, this is what that is. It isn't the harmonics sounding pleasant to them, it is the noise reaching audible levels.

I just saw this review myself, why would anyone pay this for this when you can have a state of the Art benchmark, which BTW in Europe is 4100 Euro's, but still.

 

[Blomquist]

Measurements are the least of problem in this thing. It's dangerous. . Look at high current wires pressed between the case and psu !

I don't see any - really - any high current wires inside this unit.

 

[Timcognito]

Blind Faith is a powerful thing. The desire to fit in is also a powerful thing. Our brains can make us believe just about anything is real or possible if we decide beforehand that we want to feel/see/participate in the delusion/illusion. For one of the best examples of how powerful the brain can be. Do some research on the Medical development of the “Placebo” effect. Once intrenched in a particular dogma it becomes nearly impossible to break free.

Placebo in history - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[GXAlan]

It isn't the harmonics sounding pleasant to them, it is the noise reaching audible levels.

Blind Faith is a powerful thing.

It may be an audible version of this visual effect. The left image is your “straight wire with gain going into your brain” and the right image is artificially adding noise to the same image.

The above isn’t bias, it’s just perception. If these effects occur visually, it would seem that there should be auditory illusions.

Source article.

 

[Ruhled]

Just another example of a poorly executed tube amp with inflated specs to boot. The noise isn't the tubes fault it's the circuit and layout. Not all tube amps are this bad. I agree it's probably not that audible unless the speakers are high sensitivity.

 

[AdamG]

View attachment 434297

They are us. There is no separate group that is immune to this human condition. We all have so many biases and beliefs that we would struggle to count them or list them. They range from every aspect of our lives. We/they/us. Trying to understand the other person’s bias/beliefs is a good step in creating an opportunity to pierce the boundaries of understanding. Leading people to the data and science is all we can do. An over simplification to be sure. But we exist to present a different perspective and path for learning. Gently lead them to the water. Drinking must be their choice.

I don’t know about you. But I’m still very thirsty….

 

[ObjectiveSubjectivist]

How do people that claim they can hear the difference between cables manage to ignore all of that?

Ill answer you with a music clip.
It's very well known music to all club residents in Poland born in "my times"

It perfectly fits situation