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<blockquote data-quote="John Roberts" data-source="post: 131586" data-attributes="member: 126">Re: Analog comeback?My personal design philosophy regarding euphonic signal non-linearities (like distortion or frequency response errors) is the customer is always right, so if enough customers want them they can have them, but by all means provide a bypass switch so you can also deliver a clean, flat path. I saw too much nonsense in the hifi business (still going on with esoteric recording products) where different models have their own secret sauce of euphonic deviation from linear. The problem for an objective engineer designing components to be used in a larger system where you do not control all the other links in the chain, at what point does having too much good sounding distortion become bad sounding? If each separate module has added distortion I can predict how that will turn out (badly). Reading the audio-phool journals a product&#039;s fortune would often depend on what other products it was used with for listening tests (don&#039;t get me started on phono preamp reviewers :-( ).&nbsp; It&#039;s like cooking a meal and starting out with a dirty pot because you liked how the last meal tasted. I prefer to always start with a clean cooking pot. Back in the &#039;80s when I was still writing my column for a recording magazine I dedicated one column to a joke glossary of all the imprecise terms musicians and producers routinely throw around in studios and think that they are actually communicating information. In a bit of Karmic payback years later when I was voicing the EQ for my large recording console at Peavey (AMR), Hartley brought in a well know recording engineer/producer and they has a good old time talking with each other about how the EQ needed &quot;balls&quot; and other such terms (yes he was a bass player too). Just like we do when musicians spout such nonsense I guessed. I extended the low-mid sweep range down an octave so he could grab his &quot;balls&quot; with the EQ knob. He loved the newly voiced module I sent him to listen to in his studio.JR</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Roberts, post: 131586, member: 126"] Re: Analog comeback? My personal design philosophy regarding euphonic signal non-linearities (like distortion or frequency response errors) is the customer is always right, so if enough customers want them they can have them, but by all means provide a bypass switch so you can also deliver a clean, flat path. I saw too much nonsense in the hifi business (still going on with esoteric recording products) where different models have their own secret sauce of euphonic deviation from linear. The problem for an objective engineer designing components to be used in a larger system where you do not control all the other links in the chain, at what point does having too much good sounding distortion become bad sounding? If each separate module has added distortion I can predict how that will turn out (badly). Reading the audio-phool journals a product's fortune would often depend on what other products it was used with for listening tests (don't get me started on phono preamp reviewers :-( ). It's like cooking a meal and starting out with a dirty pot because you liked how the last meal tasted. I prefer to always start with a clean cooking pot. Back in the '80s when I was still writing my column for a recording magazine I dedicated one column to a joke glossary of all the imprecise terms musicians and producers routinely throw around in studios and think that they are actually communicating information. In a bit of Karmic payback years later when I was voicing the EQ for my large recording console at Peavey (AMR), Hartley brought in a well know recording engineer/producer and they has a good old time talking with each other about how the EQ needed "balls" and other such terms (yes he was a bass player too). Just like we do when musicians spout such nonsense I guessed. I extended the low-mid sweep range down an octave so he could grab his "balls" with the EQ knob. He loved the newly voiced module I sent him to listen to in his studio. JR [/QUOTE]

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