That would be a neat engineering feat to pull this without it showing on a FR sweep. Thing many of those amps, including Nelson Pass' show a nice flat FR from 20 to 20,000 within .5 dB
From Stereophile ... the XA.30.5
Still from Stereophile for the X1000 in what they call "simulated loudspeaker" load ...
Notice that for the graph above the scale for the amplitude (vertical) .
One is a 30 wpc and the other I suppose a more than 500 wpc amplifier... The Frequency response graphs are flat as pancake in the midrange (elsewhere too but....). I am close to certain that there will be a bloom in the midrange and miles of depth and ligh-years of width of the soundstage from the usual reviewers....
I have come to understand that on things that are subjective, the trick is to find a few people, in the old days we called them "critics", now they are called and with just reason, "influencers"... , who can develop the ability to sway public opinions, based on their own opinions (sincere or not)_ of given products, ware or oeuvre. This is a serious debate, as the critics have a role they play in shaping the sense, direction of aesthetics and even behavior, of a group of people. People cannot see all plays there are or films or l read all poetry or books or ... paintings, etc, thus Societies have come to rely and even encourage some people with the requisite writing or oratorical skills to critic the production of artists, artisans, producer of goods, goods and, yes, manufacturers. Their influence has grown, we find them in anything and everything from automobiles to restaurant, places, cities , instrument or wines, etc .... They have a certain usefulness and they are often wrong too, even statistically. We have seen movies that were panned by critics, yet become mega-success with people flocking the theaters and stores to purchase these ( same with music by the way ... ).
not entirely a rant and this is on-topics so please read on... It i part of the message to any audiophile who visits ASR
We are at a point where we can produce at very low prices devices whose purpose is to capture, reproduce or amplify audio signals within the limits of the human hearing apparatus: exceedingly precise microphone like the miniDSP U-mike is $100, 30 years ago it might have cost thousands of dollars to get similar performance. A perfectly transparent DAC is in the form of a dongle, people a dongle!!! Costing $9.oo , nine dollars!!! … We can record and store on a stupid $300 laptop what in he od days would have required a multi-thousand dollars tape recorder. Yet we have also seen the same rise of the critics aka “audio reviewers” and some of them are arbiters of taste and in many ways king makers. To name , names without actually "naming names"
, a person named Mildly Frame-it of a certain 'phile magazine could kill a product by just not liking it or even simply changing from it to another brand … companies rise because , mf, "likes their product so much, he had to buy it"..., back in the days so could the fabled and late HP from an … absolute magazine... And there exist their homologues on the Internet too. The High End Audio industry understand this. They understand the serious money that can be made selling luxury and they developed this symbiotic relationship.At one of the receiving ends are the audiophiles by now entirely convinced that measurements don't
tell the whole story. He/she is from that point in time prepped… he/she knows that the ideal is there likely attained by that $115,000 quad-boxes “stack” but that is a serious amount of money for just one component, a bit out of what he/she can or is willing to spend; so he starts chasing that sound around a lesser budget. He will get a $20,000 DAC he will audition it, like it purchase it and a few months or years later no longer be satisfied and now move sideways in price and get the Svetlaveck 1050 which was said to be almost (the magical word) as good as the $115,000 DAC system; That one review by an influencer aka “audio reviewer” who reviewed for many days on his $350,000 speaker driven by the $75,000 preamplifier , the $150,000 amplifier, and the $75,000 speaker cable, of course they used the MuitZoon USB cable that cost $10,000…. This one, theMuitZoon "Perfect Digit" treated cryogenically and bomabraded by quantum mechanics USB cable, he may be able to stretch a bit and acquire it … You can see a lot of thousands going in some people's pockets, for what is simply a dressed-up version of a Belkin USB cable, likely from the exact same factory and, of course, same measurements (which as you should remember don’t matter)…. He will eventually not like that DAC, too since it lacks musicality and realism … Thus, next, he’ll get totally "dacked" by a Tube DAC costing less than his current one: $15,000…. Hot tubes to warm up the glacial pace of Solid state and digital reproduction. Totally!
This is changing, ASR and other are showing to audiophiles that there is a better way. That there exists an objective reality, that we humans share a lot in how we hear and what we prefer to hear… That there are limits to what we can hear and that there are much less expensive way to reach audio nirvana: Focus on measurements, mostly on speakers.
The next step to me is how to approach the room, the last frontier. What set of measurements of strategies of preparation for our rooms, of research of practical ways to have a decent room and, yes, at what cost. It makes no sense to have $10,000 of room treatments to enjoy a great measuring $600/pair active speaker pair (e.g. JBL LSR 308) driven by a PC and a $200 DAC… For room treatments we need studies and guides, set of measurements that are relevant and accessible to mere mortals.
Peace
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