desol said:
Easy.... the goal of a good amp is to accurately amplify whatever signal is sent into it's input, nothing more, and hopefully nothing important, less.
I wrestled with this exact question decades ago... The ultimate goal of any sound system is to sound good, but it is impossible to design just one link of a multi-link audio chain, and know exactly how much magic foo to add or subtract into that one link to make the entire chain sound just right. If every designer adds enough foo for the entire chain into just their one link of the chain, we then get way too much foo when we mix and match audio links together from different designers. My philosophy was always to make the link I was responsible for as transparent as possible... music in=music out, nothing more, nothing less.
I found it remarkable, and a little odd, how people could bravely design a power amp or phono preamp by ear, to sound good to their personal taste, without accounting for the vagaries of phono cartridges, turntable/cart loading, loudspeakers, and even the listening rooms. It's not a surprise that the hot HIFI box du jour, was often used in combination with other popular hot boxes of the day that cohesively worked together as a good sounding system. Perhaps the same combination of products the designer listened to while designing.
For the record I am not suggesting that everybody be satisfied with ruler flat, pristine, audio chains, but lets call effects what they are, put them in their own little black box, preferably with a knob for more/less, and a bypass switch. Then we can make all the standard audio links arbitrarily linear, accurate, and noise free. This also would give control of the foo to the end user... ;D
Note: I designed some studio efx (Loft delay/flanger) and that was an entirely different mission. It was never intended to be a straight wire with gain. It was born to make things sound different and linearity was never the design goal, sounding good was.
Of course opinions vary...
JR
PS: if two pieces of gear sound different, and are different, that difference can be measured. Once we can measure it we can manage it.
