"Pooh Bear" wrote
in message

Stewart Pinkerton wrote:

Russ Hamm proved it in 1973 with his paper which
appeared in JAES and it has not been contradicted. Arny
talks a lot but he knows it's true and will be until
they change the laws of physics.

Hamm's paper was not peer-reviewed,

AFAIK, *everything* in the JAES is peer-reviewed. I guess the peers were
also tubies. Either that or they were smokin' some gooooood stuff. Maybe
both. ;-)

and it was written
so long ago that it is irrelevant to modern amplifiers.

The Hamm paper was no doubt obsolete on the day it was written, for many
reasons. One problem I've noticed with it is that it compared the
large-signal distortion of amplifier stages with differing gains. Since the
stage gains differed, the output signals differered dramatically in terms of
amplitude. Hamm thus built his case against SS on the fact that simple SS
amplifier stages tend to have higher stage gain than triode tubes.

The laws of physics have not changed, but our ability to
manufacture excellent SS devices certainly has.

Agreed. Among the first SS test equipment to come out were audio signal
distortion measuring equipment.

Worse still, Hamm considered only a very dated style of
a.c. coupled common emitter transistor amplifer without
degeneration and the majority of his conclusions were
about its character when *overdriven * ! Simple. You
avoid 'overdriving' !

I'd like to find some AES old-timers and get some straight answers about how
a POS like the Hamm paper made it through the JAES review process. The
guilty parties are probably dead and gone by now, so the truth might be
knowable despite the confidentiality of the review process.