I promised to keep you updated with the amplifier progress. There's good news and bad news.
For those following the saga of the amp development the good news is the new input stage works better than we expected. We designed a zero feedback class A high voltage gain stage. It's about as simple as one can manage with but a single MOSFET device in the signal path for voltage gain and one other for current gain. It sounds unbelievably good. Open, musical to a fault (whatever that means) and just a joy to listen to. It is still connected to a Class D output stage. And we have finally faced the fact that's the stumbling block.
The output stage is a great product and many companies use it with wonderful results. We've not been able to do the same. Not to the level of our expectations and not to the point where we could happily live with it in Music Room One for life. We will now take a different approach and design the output stage ourselves, one that matches the sound of the input stage and hopefully gets us where we need to be.
To put this in perspective, however, let me suggest that as the prototype stands right now it'd kick butt on many of the power amps out there and we'd be justified in calling it done. To many that have heard it, they can't imagine why we haven't yet released it. We haven't released it because it's not perfect. And this decision despite the fact we understand that no product is going to be perfect in the classic sense of the word. It is, in fact, the Designer's Dilemma.
The Designer's Dilemma describes the point an artist or creator has the courage to release her work and say "it is done".
Once you bring a creation to a certain point you find yourself at a crossroads. Could it be better? Could we add one more dab of paint, one more feature, one less word, one final tweak? Is it perfect? Is it our best effort? Do we have enough soul invested to share our work with others?
In the case of the amp it's no. Not yet.
