jaw@ames.UUCP (James A. Woods) (08/31/84)
# "Mine for 'good enough' fidelity" -- anonymous
Aha, the universal amplifier! Bob Carver is famous for confronting
golden ears with the nonlinearities they prefer. (Yes, he can also
add that 2% third-harmonic THD to get that mushy but "melodic" tube sound
to his amps.)
So ... why not go all the way, and provide switch settings on those
linear (but inexpensive) transistor circuits to simulate the flawed
personalities of a variety of those boat anchor beasts. With digital
filtering it oughta be easy; just dial a knob to get that venerable
Macintosh sound, or the gold-plated farting of a Conrad-Johnson, or that
60's p-n-p clipping breakup effect, or that Scott receiver ear-tickle, etc.
And we can do the more dramatic speaker simulations, too.
Remember that JBL 3 kHz "presence" (they got away with it for years by
not publishing specs), the Heil driver phony high end, the rock monitor
80-100 Hz chest-cavity-resonant "bump"? Something for everyone.
At least it's nice to know that the eardrums of even the most
anally-retentive audio buff are not much more accurate than those of
the rest of us (if they were, then 10 db heartbeats of the listener
would be a bother). Mr. Carver has proved this over and over with his fireside
phase and THD experiments (exposing for all the red herrings that the audio
industry [including Carver himself] has made millions from). Tin ears
may or may not take solace in the fact that, like wine snobs, the
audio perfectionist is just a little more trained to recognize the
gross characteristics (often cost-related) of equipment they have known
and loved. To Bob Carver, the good scientist and parasitic engineer
rolled-into-one (he admits the temporary joke nature of his Digital
"Time Lens", meant to appeal to the ever-dwindling anti-CD faction) --
let's cater to this nonsense with the universal amplifier!
-- James A. Woods {hplabs,hao,philabs}!ames!jaw (jaw@riacs.ARPA)