Justin from ampsandsound likes OG crack more too:
He is correct that there's an attachment to really simple understandable changes (swapping caps or tubes for example), and the Speedball is certainly not simple, nor particularly understandable on the surface. The claim isn't that tubes are linear and distortion free, it's that they are sufficiently linear and distortion free that the option is available to use no global feedback to correct for these issues. Oddly enough the Speedball improves this aspect a bit and makes more power available at the headphone jack.
His point about fast vs. slow transients between tubes and solid state is something I don't particularly agree with. Overcoming input capacitance of a given device is equally applicable in both tubes and solid state, though these issues are exceptionally common when using equipment with lots of 12AX7s.
His comments about balanced outputs are just flat out wrong. His definition of what a balanced connection is around 16:50 is not correct (he is confusing what balanced means with a differential circuit/output). At 17:20 he mentions that you need four output transformers for balanced output, which just isn't correct either. He then calls a push-pull amp a single ended device, smh...
The discussion of power supplies around the 30 minute mark lumps all wall warts in as switching supplies, though he mentions one that came with his Rega turntable that's just a little power transformer tucked into a wall wart. He additionally glosses over linear supply wall warts (we supplied on with the DAC we sold some years ago) which are just a small transformer, rectifier bridge, and power supply caps.
At 34 minutes OTL amps come up in the discussion, but nothing really about the Speedball... Then we move on to "unfixable" class D amps (you can definitely fix a class D amp, check out Barevids on YouTube). At 47 minutes, we finally get the reason to not use the Speedball... "it uses Jfets". Guess what, we have
never put a Jfet in any of our products! I couldn't disagree more with what he's saying, though I admit that 20 years ago when I was new to this stuff that I was reluctant to use the C4S circuit. (I was also reluctant to use the 6DJ8/6922 initially, which he also mentions, but when used with stoppers/snubbers they perform excellently)
