Wouldn’t it just be great if we had a recipe for transparency in circuits? Just add a bit of this and bingo it’s a see-through piece of equipment. Want more transparency? Maybe it’s just like hot sauce—add more or less depending on taste.
Unfortunately, nothing in our world of design is that simple or formulaic.
There are certainly recipes for disaster: do this or go that direction and it’ll kill the music. But, that’s what we want to avoid.
The recipes for success are so dependent on other factors—the type of circuit, the components within, its function, its peripherals—that all we can really suggest is to start with known designs and work through them with the intent of doing as little harm as possible.
It is understandable when frustrated audiophiles ask us why another manufacturer’s product wasn’t as transparent or dynamic or open as they had hoped. It’s easy to fall in love with a product’s functional beauty and just as easy to be disappointed when its sonic performance doesn’t live up to your expectations.
On the plus side, we can usually look at a circuit and guess why it’s not performing as well as it might.
On the negative side, it might take a redesign to fix it.
Most recipes in circuit design are only starting points. The final product has to be tasted and tweaked with a custom solution.
