The thing about perfection
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsIt’s not something attainable in a product – I have no desire to work on achieving it – it is a fool’s errand.
I bring this to your attention because of all the kind notes people have been sending me about the new power amplifier and my quest to “perfect it”. I am not trying to make it perfect, for that is a goal that cannot be achieved. I get it and I appreciate all the support,
No, what’s perfect for one is wrong for another, it is an illusion that can be maddening to try and achieve.
My goal is to create a product with no obvious flaws, one that thrills the listener and honors the music.
More than that would be to run in circles – I get dizzy easily.
Hi Paul,
Having spent 30 plus years as a Product Manager defining products in medical imaging I can appreciate and agree with your comment…
“No, what’s perfect for one is wrong for another, it is an illusion that can be maddening to try and achieve.”
But isn’t your next comment, “My goal is to create a product with no obvious flaws, one that thrills the listener and honors the music.”, saying the same thing and be equally maddening?
Humm, damned if you do, damned if you don’t comes to mind.
It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but at least it’s attainable. For example, right now the amp has terrific midbass, low end and midrange one would swoon over. But its transient attack and top end don’t honor the music as they should. By that I mean steel strings sound more like quickly plucked nylon, a wooden cowbell sounds metalic and so on. That’s not honoring the music.
I can fix those things over time so there are no obvious flaws, the music is honored and the amp sounds great: I am proud to offer it to the world.
It won’t be perfect. You will always find an amp with better this or that – but the package of all the this and that’s will be what makes this amp special.
Quite an excellent compromise I think. This is a product of a proud man desiring to do the best he can, within set limitations and to put his dreams out in public. Honorable and something I could never do.
Thanks but I’ll bet in many ways you probably already do, with your family perhaps, or your work. Perhaps the only difference is I am willing to put it out there in public – something I wouldn’t have considered 10 years ago, but age has this thing …. 🙂
I admire all engineers who push the envelope of technology, and am grateful to those who have the wherewithal to finance their R&D projects as they purchase equipment I will never afford.
I am eternally in debt to those who utilize these technological advances to make equipment I can afford. It takes talent and dedication to bring this technology to a price point that is within reach – Steve Wozniak’s development of an affordable floppy drive perhaps being one of the greatest feats of the past century – and I’m thrilled that we have a blog that allows us a look inside the process with equipment that matters and people we are proud to support.
I think one of the hard things about achieving perfection is defining it. What does perfection mean?
“right now the amp has terrific midbass, low end and midrange one would swoon over.†Playing whose recordings, through whose speakers, in whose room? Will I get the same results with my recordings, my speakers, in my room? How would one know in advance?
The other day I attended a violin master class. Five students played five very difficult pieces. All had spectacular technique, nearly flawless. But only one made music IMO. The others had no modulation of loudness or tempo, no nuances. But in their minds I’m sure they played to near perfection. It was as though a machine recited Shakespeare with perfect diction in a loud monotone. Whatever that would be it wouldn’t be acting, it wouldn’t be Shakespeare. Does perfection in some dimensions mean anything if there are major flaws in others that should matter? The quality of the students’ violins ranged from very good to poor. Does a perfect amplifier render the worst of them, the one that sounded thin, nasal, and shrill as it really is or as we’d like it to sound?
Since an amplifier is a purely electronic device making no sound of its own, shouldn’t perfection be defined by measurements according to the mathematics used to model what an amplifier does or should do to an electronic signal? Which is more perfect, the amplifier that makes a recording of bad sound good or sound bad? I ask this because so far not a single audiophile has been able to give me their definition of an ideal amplifier. So in this regard, what is your definition of the perfect amplifier and how will you know if and when you ever come close to achieving it?
It’s a good question and the answer, at least for me, is when instruments sound like themselves on well recorded pieces played back on systems I find capable of doing so. I judge those simply by virtue of the fact I have witnessed them doing so under similar circumstances.
Yes but you are listening to an entire system from the point where sound emanates from the instrument to the point where it reaches your ears. There are many elements all with their own variables in between. How do you isolate the amplifier to the point where you can say it is perfect? Does one system with one set of variables in these elements have one perfect amplifier and another system with a different set of variables have a different perfect amplifier?
That’s one of the greater mysteries to me and one I just seem to “accept” with little questioning. I’ll give you an example. In the last amp shootout the system was fixed and all we did was insert amplifier A or B, gain match them and listen.
The system as it stood produced sound such that the instruments we were focusing on (cymbals, wood blocks, plucked string instruments) all sounded “right” and you could easily identify the types of strings being plucked, etc. (at least we thought we could). Insert amplifier B and that ability goes away, the sound dulled in comparison with an apparent reduction in “rise time” – again, at least that’s how it sounded.
On taking amplifier B back to a completely different system those same qualities could easily be heard.
So what happens when your redesigned amplifier has the same treble as the Sonic Frontiers 3 amplifier at the next shootout with Arnie Nudell’s system and then you install it in system B? Will it sound unbearably shrill? Will it be worse there than it was before? It certainly should be different. Does this explain in part why audiophiles seem to keep perpetually shopping and swapping looking for the holy grail and rarely if ever finding it?
I suppose it depends on how you fix the problem. In my experience what you’re suggesting might happen doesn’t happen as long as you make sure you haven’t screwed something else in the process and the changes you make are getting to the fundamental issues – when you do that it sounds better on everything else.
Well just keep your fingers crossed that you’re right. I think the engineering skills required to be a systems engineer are different from those to engineer the components that comprise the system. That’s part of the problem, each manufacturer designs equipment in a vacuum isolated from other equipment and then leaves it to the buyer to design the system. This is often done by very expensive trial and error. Your idea of manufacturing a complete system that is engineered from beginning to end sounds like a good one but I think audiophiles see themselves a expert able to pick and choose for themselves. The thing is, they keep swapping one expensive piece of equipment for another, invariably at a loss. But they don’t seem to mind it.
I’m sure you’ve heard that an ideal amplifier is “a straight wire with gain.” Audiophiles have been quoting that definition for the last 40 years.
Yeah, I’ve heard it since about the 1960s. It’s a meaningless marketing slogan, not an engineering specification. As I vaguely recall, it came from Harman Kardon’s advertising department. Taken literally it wouldn’t make for much of an audio power amplifier. It would have the same very high impedance as the source, useless for driving low impedance loudspeakers.
How very true. You are on the right track and the possibility of achieving a breakthrough product are great with this attitude.It’s very wise to have one’s feet planted firmly on terra firma while one’s head is in the clouds as you well know. Wishing you the best. Regards.