In article , mick
wrote:
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 18:36:39 +0100, Wally wrote:


What, exactly, is "hi-fi"?

Something to argue about!

hi-fi: 1 High Fidelity. 2 Equipment for the high-fidelity reproduction
of sound. USE infml

Fidelity: 1a The quality or state of being faithful, loyalty 1b accuracy
in details, exactness 2 the degree of similarity between some reproduced
(e.g. recorded) material and its original source

(Longman Pocket English Dictionary)

Based on which, you *don't* want a perfect amplifier, you want one with
the opposite response to your room and speakers so that your ears hear
something close to the original source. Failing that, why not just
settle for something that sounds nice to you? ;-)

The point to note is that you employed the term "perfect", but this term
was not used in the dictionary quotes you gave, nor did you define its
meaning. :-)

Thus, we can say that a 'perfect' amp would indeed have the characteristics
you require - to cancel out the response variations of your room and
speakers. The problem is that the amp designer does not know what these
variations may be. Hence they tend to just amplify (i.e. scale up or down)
the signal, and leave it to you to sort out these response problems in some
other way.

Hence some sort of 'tone controls' may be useful - but alas, the audio
gurus in magazines have declared these are forbidden. :-)

Above said, although pre-processing the input to the speakers may help, the
real problem of the room acoustic is more complex than this, so I'd say
that the 'optimum' method is to work on the room acoustic and speaker
choice/placement. And then just use an amp with a fairly flat response...

Slainte,

Jim

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