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In Reply to: Charles, you don't have to apologize for liking your own products posted by 4everyoung on September 22, 2017 at 02:33:35:
> > If you didn't think your products were the best you shouldn't be selling them. Am I right? < <
Hi Sue,
Yes, and even deeper than that. If we didn't feel that they were markedly better than what is already on the market, we wouldn't bother to build it. Does the world really need *another* power amp, preamp, DAC, CD player, or whatever?
It seems to me that there are hundreds of choices, at all price points, with many different features, in all sorts cosmetic presentations - from the utilitarian NAD look to the over-the-top (IMO) elaborately machined-from-solid-billet Chord Electronics. Why build another *anything*?
To me the only reason is because almost every company is designing products in pretty much the same way. Every tube circuit imaginable was already cooked up 50 years ago. About the only thing to do is to use higher quality parts and decide how much to spend on the power supply.
Solid-state has actually gone backwards in my opinion. I alluded to this when you mentioned your vintage (which to me means '70s) era Japanese amp or receiver (I forget which). In those days, everyone pretty much used discrete transistor circuitry, and even sometimes JFETs and/or MOSFETs. There was a lot of room for inventing new circuit topologies, and the master was John Curl.
Now almost all solid-state is strictly IC op-amps for sources and line-level devices - which is why so much equipment sounds so similar. They are using the same circuits (inside the IC op-amps) that were either designed by Analog Devices or Texas Instruments, and the same DAC chips - either ESS or Burr-Brown used in the same ways shown in the chip manufacturer's application notes.
The last hold-out has been power amplifiers because it is too difficult to build an IC that can put out 100 watts. But even the discrete class A/B designs tend to be derivative and largely variants on one basic design that was developed 40 years ago (the so-called "Lin" topology). But even that is going out of style as so many are changing to class-D (switching) modules. A lot of the unique circuitry is patented, so manufacturers just by pre-made modules from B&O and more lately from N-Core (designed by Bruno Putzeys - a very smart man).
Virtually all of the prominent companies got their start by being a "one-trick pony", and then building from that. McIntosh developed their "unity-coupled" output transformer which applied a lot of feedback from the plates of the output tubes to the cathodes of the output tubes. This allowed the class A/B output stage to have extremely low (measured) distortion. The cost was a very complex output transformer with 4 identical primary windings (push-pull plate and push-pull cathode), plus the output stage had no gain and required extremely high drive voltages. This required an extra gain stage capable of swinging 200 volts P-P. But it measured better than any other competing product. Everything else they made was high-quality, well-implemented standard engineering. But that "one-trick" is what allowed them to dominate during the tube era.
Same with Dynaco. Dave Hafler and somebody Keroes invented the tapped primary to apply feedback to the screens of a pentode. This also lowered the distortion of the A/B output stage - not as much as the McIntosh, so it could use a much more conventional (and low cost) driver stage. As far as other circuit innovations, that was about it - until decades later Hafler when hired Erno Borbely as a consultant to design the XL-280 power amp - quite a nice design in its day.
Paul Klipsch developed an extremely intricate and complex folded horn that exited into the bottom corner of the room, and utilized the room walls and the shape of the speaker cabinet to extend the horn mouth to nearly 8' square with only a (relatively) small cabinet. All the rest of his designs were fairly straight-forward and didn't introduce new innovations.
When I founded Avalon to build loudspeakers, it seemed like half of the speakers on the market were two-way designs with a 6-1/2" plastic-cone (either polypropylene or Bextrene) woofer and a 1" cloth dome tweeter crossed over at 3 kHz (±500 Hz). Naturally they all sounded pretty much the same. It's easy to see why companies like Magnepan and Acoustat could do well - not that their designs were perfect, but at least they offered much more than the same old tired thinking that produced scores of similar designs from each of a hundred different loudspeaker companies. (Do you remember the old Audio magazine annual "buyer's guide"? It listed all of the products on the market along with the manufacturer's specs in a spreadsheet format. There were over 300 different brands of loudspeakers!)
There have been very few companies (especially in the field of audio) that have continually introduced novel concepts and new circuit topologies year-after-year for decades. I am proud that Ayre is one of them, and not just a "one-trick-pony". When you think outside of the box, it is possible to build something that is years ahead of what the competition is doing. A good example is the Ayre AX-7e. It was introduced in 2002 and upgraded to the e version at the end of 2004. It remained in Stereophile's Class A recommend components (with a $ for high value and three stars to indicate a long-time recommendation) for over a decade. We finally discontinued it last year because people tend to think that something 12 years old can't possibly be as good as "the new stuff" and sales slowly tapered off. But you won't find many used ones for sale. Most people that bought them either still have them or love them, a few upgraded higher up in the Ayre product range and sold theirs, but most kept them for a second system elsewhere in the house or gave it to one of the children when they left the nest. Currently none on eBay, 2 AX-7e's on Audiogon for over half of their original list price, and even 1 old AX-7 (pre-evolution upgrade).
The world does not need (nor can it sustain) new gadgets every year or two.
Cheers,
Charles Hansen
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- RE: Charles, you don't have to apologize for liking your own products - Charles Hansen 09/22/1714:16:31 09/22/17 (0)
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