nelsonvandal

This looks very unimpressive for such an expensive amp. I can't believe there's a Graham Slee cult.

OK, not quackery, just fetishism. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I agree, a wooden cup probably make a difference, but I don't think they could sell an equally good plastic cup for the same price. About memory distortion, I don't think it's about pushing spikes through a transistor. You're supposed to measure the offset caused by heating a transistor with the amp running at open loop, and sum it up with the dissipated power of the same transistor fed with an arbitrary input signal with the amp running in closed loop to get an "annoyance factor". One would think that a class (A)B output stage would be most affected but it's not. I think this is in harmony with my listening experience - the input stage has a much greater influense over the sound compared to the output stage. Another way to lessen the subjective annoyance is to use better transistors with low Cob for the input-, cascode- and VA-stages.

Fancy cables, connectors, capacitors, volume knobs, fuses, expensive wooden earcups, power cords etc etc is quackery. Adding CFP to the input is not. Cascoding is not. It's very substantial both by measurement and in listening tests. Maybe it's not memory distortion that explains why these tweaks make a better sound, maybe it is. Do the tweaks and find out for yourself if it's all BS or a revelation.

I also find this article intriguing and substantial. We all know that THD and harmonic spectrum doesn't say it all. I've tried CFP and cascoded input stages, but not yet the combination advocated by the author. Contradictory to the article I find CFP to be a major improvement compared to cascode. The combination of JFET input and bipolar "slave" gives the best performance with the best of both worlds - warm and full musical sound and low bias input currents from the JFETs and the clean, detailed airy presentation of bipolars. Try this and be impressed!