Niteshade Audio design philosophy: What sets us apart from the rest!

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Niteshade

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Beacon One

A preamp I had to repair recently:


They're opposites in design fundamentals as well as performance. The jungle preamp as I call it has a nice, flat frequency response, which is good. The problem: It sounds uniquely 1-D. Not even 2-D, not even close! It was much like a drugstore pocket AM radio in terms of liveliness. What is the meaning behind all that extra baggage? I worked on it and still can not tell you. It's there...because they could put it there. This is what's called magazine eye candy.

An exceptionally good observation: "You can't compare the two. One is tube and the other is solid state."

That has nothing to do with design philosophy and need not be a concern. Transistor circuits can be well designed. In lab, we made a voltage amplifier with a perfect waveform that used very few components. It did not take a 50 watt power supply to run like the above preamp.


Music likes a clean, airy space to move around in. The more components there are, the more potential there is to damage an incoming signal. While designing, I think about these things:

1. What do the active components require to operate perfectly?
2. What is necessary to make a clean, stable circuit?
3. How can we make this compatible with the widest array of sources, speakers, amps, preamps, etc...
4. If I were to repair this, how would I want it to be laid out?
5. If it can not be made with a clean, conservative design then it will be discarded. ( Many design concepts are worthless.)

There are many devices which have to be complex by nature. If, by nature something has to be complex, there is nothing wrong with that. My issue resides with designs that __do not__ have to be made complex and are perverted by those who want to impress solely by a massive components count.



« Last Edit: 28 Jun 2012, 11:38 am by Niteshade »

pardales

Nicely made point.  :D