Second “Thoughts”

[Apollo16]

Or just realizing electronics' contributions are vastly overrated in the high-end? The ART phono stages have measured well, tho. What is a musical amp, tho?

With preamps it's hard to quantify. I'll give you an example though. Between a high quality streamer or TT and the active JBLs lies either a passive preamp or another audio interface. The JBLs containing a mixture of quality transducers, power amps and DSP are extremely revealing. The JDS Labs product sounded sterile - I wanted to press pause almost immediately. Whereas with the Linn preamp or the Art Accessories I wanted to carry on listening to album after album. A good audio interface or good passive preamp doesn't remove the musical enjoyment - it ought to add to the fun!

 

[lovinthehd]

With preamps it's hard to quantify. I'll give you an example though. Between a high quality streamer or TT and the active JBLs lies either a passive preamp or another audio interface. The JBLs containing a mixture of quality transducers, power amps and DSP are extremely revealing. The JDS Labs product sounded sterile - I wanted to press pause almost immediately. Whereas with the Linn preamp or the Art Accessories I wanted to carry on listening to album after album. A good audio interface or good passive preamp doesn't remove the musical enjoyment - it ought to add to the fun!

I'm familiar with the 305s, have a pair. The amps are nothing to write home about, typical class d, and isn't even that sophisticated in that they supply the same power to mid-woofer and tweeter (and much modern music has gone thru a variety of adc/dac conversions too). I use high quality streaming (pretty easy to do), and have a high quality tt (well as far as that goes with vinyl). I've not had electronics interfere with my enjoyment of music....and I've got quite a wide variety hanging around. Your comparison methods are what particularly?

 

[Apollo16]

I'm familiar with the 305s, have a pair. The amps are nothing to write home about, typical class d, and isn't even that sophisticated in that they supply the same power to mid-woofer and tweeter (and much modern music has gone thru a variety of adc/dac conversions too). I use high quality streaming (pretty easy to do), and have a high quality tt (well as far as that goes with vinyl). I've not had electronics interfere with my enjoyment of music....and I've got quite a wide variety hanging around. Your comparison methods are what particularly?

For me the quality of the implementation of the components matters more than the class of amp for example. I've a house with considerably more HiFi than I'll ever require. Along my audiophile path I've encountered two or three products that failed to deliver sound that accurately reflected the source information or that conveyed the music with the emotional impact it ought to have. I listen carefully using reference tracks plus familiar and unfamiliar music. Each change that I make is recorded with clips before and after which are shared with a small group of friends.