Speaker Cables — Nelson Pass / 1980

AUDIOPHILES RECENTLY BEGAN re-examining the performance of every link in the audio playback chain, and before long their attention turned to the lowly loudspeaker cable. In response to demand, a number of companies are producing or distributing new and exotic cables claimed to improve audio power transmission from amplifier to speaker. Pointing to lower resistance and inductance, proponents of the newer cables insist they sound significantly better ("better than an expander!"); however, the subject is controversial, and some hi-fi notables claim performance increase is negligible and the higher capacitance of some new cables can cause amplifier instability and damage.1-4 Neither… More...

Single Ended Class A — Nelson Pass / 1995

Single-Ended Class A amplifiers have certainly hit it big in the four years since we began testing the first Aleph 0. So is this just another audio fad, or is there something fundamental about this kind of design, justifying a revival of the old approaches to amplification? When I started designing amplifiers twenty-five years ago, solid state amplifiers had just achieved a firm grasp on the market. Power and harmonic distortion numbers were the important thing, and the largest audio magazine said that amplifiers with the same specs sounded the same. We have heard Triodes, Pentodes, Bipolar, VFET, Mosfet, TFET… More...