I own a pair of BP 15 (BP=baffle plan=open baffle) from the french manufacturer Rouault Acoustic🇫🇷, and it was a huge change in my audiophile routine, and all is told is really true. I’ll never go back to conventional speakers anymore, for sure…

I have some Carver Amazing that were gifted to me should I bother to refoam? What Clayton said about horns is how I feel but the wife hates the my large horns.

"We make everything ourselves, except the drivers." Aha, so you make the wood and solder together a crossover. Anyone who praises this as top engineering should keep their mouth shut when it comes to the DIY sector. I would like to know what your "encouragement to build something yourself" looks like in detail. Do you tell people to buy the drivers Spatial uses, screw the base to a baffle and that's it? Hardly. Because that would be extremely stupid from a marketing point of view.

You still don't understand why open baffle sound the way they do. OPEN BAFFLE HAS EQUAL AMOUNTS OF DIRECT AND REFLECTED SOUND. It is the reflected part that yields the depth and spaciousness. Positioning is also important, and toe in, to create the spatial patterns that make the soundstage size and shape.

Good talk. You guys get it. As. Metal head. I definitely just focused on what works for "me".

Meshuggah bleed. But now it's phantoms

Turn them on got damn

too many permutatins...headache..... are your tubes matched, to what parameteres.........after one year, we must buy new tubes... any recomendations... , what about RE BIASING.... for new tubes.

If this is all I need to worry about in the coming years with my Ultralinear + I’ll be delighted. Am loving my brass buttons, patina or not. Please keep up the excellent customer service and stay business!

Great, now I'm noticing how dirty every knob and button in our studio is. Time to get polishin'!

I got into jazz in early 2023 and I can’t believe how hooked I am. I have maybe 50 jazz records now and have a collection of 24 blue note records. So addicting to listen to

Foxy lady.... Sving!!!

Well said and true...

To answer the question in the title: No.

Totally untrue! An amplifier marked as having 8 Ohm output is not actually 8 Ohms, its a fraction of an ohm. Speakers marked as 8Ohms are only that impedance at one specific frequency, usually just above resonance and beyond that the impedance rises dramatically with frequency. This leads to why passive crossovers are such flawed designs yet still used in HiFi....the professional audio world left them behind years ago. A speaker cable is not a transmission line where what you describe would make a big difference, this is reserved for the world of RF. For the transmission line argument to hold water in a speaker system, the load must remain constant, which it does not (just pull any data sheet for any raw driver), the frequency must remain constant, which it does not, and finally the amplifier or speaker and amplifier would have to be matched to the cable length.......All just pie in the sky stuff. I suspect the cables you describe that blew up amplifiers in the 70's were some form of shielded cable or other high capacitance design, MOSFET amplifiers do not tolerate capacitive loading and back in the 70's, Zobel networks were not fully understood, the Zobel network offsets the capacitance of long speaker runs and attempts to make the amplifier see a resistive load. Any cable of sufficient cross sectional area for the power, speaker impedance, and cable run length will suffice. This is a hard pill to swallow for those that have bough into the cable argument with hard earned cash. If you can double blindfold test hear the difference between two cables, one of them is faulty!

sounds like you would have to buy or rent or whatever several different cables to see if you can maybe hear which one matches your system best. I think NOT !!

The answer is: NO! As long as your speaker cables are connected, and your speaker play music, it's all good.

Makes sense, much appreciated.

Very Philosophical point & Theory that being said that is compensated for in design of the Amplifier

no difference whatsoever,, cables are never unstable

Skin affect is real , resistance in ohms is real.. They affect the sound..

You don't sound as if you've got a clue

The sound coming out of speakers with different cables can be captured and compared then you would have hard data on whether it affects the sound or not, doesn't seem like he's done that

I believe David was talking about GOERTZ cables.

One *could* also win the powerball or megamillions jackpot.

Really interesting. At last, a musically scientific approach to guide us through the complexities of cable choice. Thank you

Reflections are real and matter very much at high frequencies, especially when you're trying to measure/transmit in the MHz range, but I fail to see how it matters at the relatively low frequency range of the audio band.

Take note, " could " comes up a few times.

Excellent explanation ; appreciate David's wisdom

Super informative. It would be great to see a compare and contrast with the Ultralinear Plus integrated.

Thanks David and LTA. My LTA UL integrated is eerily quiet, not just for a tube amp, but for any amp. I wonder if the switching power supply has something to do with that?

I was not aware you had a channel. Howdy David...

Great to hear from the experts behind the products! Thank you for sharing these videos.

I've always said this myself. The power supply stage is as important as the amplification stage. Although for my own systems I generally avoid tubes because, first it's not what I grew up with, I grew up in the zenith of A/B amplifiers right before the industry switched over to class D amplification. But the principals remain the same as tubes but instead of high voltage power supplies you now have to design for high current. But after having repaired literally hundreds of pro audio amplifiers, it just really bugs me that the number one failure point I regularly see is power supply failures. Although I am interested in your ZOTL technology. I've experimented with making the high current low voltage output of a class D mini amp sound more "tubelike". The class D amp chips like the Tripath TA2020 let go of their negative feedback when approaching their voltage limits, creating the tubelike soft clipping, instead of the hard clipping like A/B amps. When combined with an output transformer the mathematical conversions very much mimic the harmonics of tubes on an output transformer down to how speaker system resonances are amplified because negative feedback is greatly reduced by the transformer. But it would be nice to eliminate the darker tone typically caused by the inductance of the audio transformer while keeping the tubelike sound of the class D amp. I've built some custom 4 watt 5 volt guitar micro amps for some guitarists who loved my demo amp. Ironically just as a joke I put a fake tube with an led light on it just to satisfy them because that way they can show off their 5v "tube" amp where they can show off the variable overdrive system I designed, it makes the woofers bloom and the tweeters crunch just like the real thing without having to resort to digital emulation. It's simply analog emulation of tube distortion.

Thanks for this! Awesome interview and some great gems from Michael!

This video had terrible sound quality itself.

I always rely on a high quality recording of a full symphony orchestra playing John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds.

First and foremost will always be orchestral music, then violin, cello, and piano concertos. Next, I want male and female solo vocalists and then after that "folk" - acoustic guitars, stand-up bass, and then lastly Rock!

the image is WAY too dark...

How are things going with the DAC?

I imagine that this amp is full of microprocessors .. In 20 years this programmed chips will probably be bad and no way to get the code ..I would recomend to include spare chips inside in some antistatic box .or container

Jazz was a creative act, to be listened and appreciated "as is". Fast forward in 2023, we are now taught "how to listen to jazz", like if it was some academic thing. Music schools are ruining jazz the same way it ruined baroque/classical/romantic/(...) music.

Wie kann man nur so viel Quatschen und sich selbst so in den Mittelpunkt stellen, wo sind die Lautsprecher?

The way David makes all this sound like he is making a box of mac n cheese tells so much about his brilliance. Just wow. 🎉

Thank you! Loving my MZ3 with a passion!

I heard Clayton was sick and about to retire. He looks pretty fresh to me!

Looking good 👍

I bet properly designed TLs sound better.

Clayton no longer works for Spatial Audio Labs. How sad.

Thank you very much for the tip 🙏