"Eiron" wrote in message
...
I was looking at 'Audio Electronics' by the late John Linsley Hood this
morning
while waiting for the newspaper to arrive, and was amused by this:

" Experiments in the late 1940s suggested that the level of audibility for
second and third harmonics was of the order of 0.6% and 0.25%
respectively,
and this led to the setting of a target value, within the audio spectrum,
of
0.1% THD, as desirable for high quality audio equipment.
However, recent work aimed at discovering the ability of an average
listener
to detect the presence og low order (i.e. second or third) harmonic
distortions
has drawn the uncomfortable conclusion that listeners, taken from a cross
section of the public, may rate a signal to which 0.5% second harmonic
distortion has been added as 'more musical' than, and therefore preferable
to,
the original undistorted input. This discovery tends to cast doubt on the
value
of some subjective testing of equipment."

So the SET set is right. single-ended valve amps are officially 'more
musical'.



Depends if you are building/buying for sound quality or specification....

See elsewhere, where I mentioned a visitor was here from 11:30 am to 9:30 pm
listening to the Holy Trinity (SET/vinyl/horns) on Thursday - guess what, he
was here again yesterday afternoon for another 3 hours.....!!!

(I don't chain 'em to the sodding hifi rack - I've said it before and I'll
say it again: Never mind the technoyap, the proof of the pudding's in the
*listening*..... ;-)