About amp "immediacy"

[Enzo]

Yes, the electrons work like the desk toy someone mentioned, the balls in a row that clack back and forth. The electrons in the row barely move, but the motion sweeps through the thing.

[yldouright]

@Dave H
On an atomic level, AC is not really current, it is an alternating polarity voltage wave that propagates at .707 the speed of light less the resistance of the conduit. When the originating pulse settles into a continuing current signal, it reverts to the 35mph speed. In this case, the desk toy analogy is more appropriate because the electrons are only disturbed and not asked to jump in an out of their orbits as is the case with DC. This is the extent of my understanding, the topic of DC and how it is defined is much more confusing and still being debated. One faction claims there is no such thing and that DC is just uber high frequency AC with a directional bias and the other claims DC is AC with one polarity muted/blocked. This better explains the resistive effect in a conduit. There is evidence to suggest both can be true depending on the circuit and medium. Scalar weapons are designed by the principle of multiplying the frequency of a polarized (near 0 angle pulse segments) by filiing the gaps with more, synchronized linear power segments. The dragging electrons observed that drift at the ultra low speed described above have lost their valence home during electrical disturbance and bond into oxides on the skin of the conduit. They are lost in every sense of the word

[Mike Sulzer]

@Dave H
On an atomic level, AC is not really current, it is an alternating polarity voltage wave that propagates at .707 the speed of light less the resistance of the conduit. In this case, the desk toy analogy is more appropriate because the electrons are only disturbed and not asked to jump in an out of their orbits as is the case with DC.

Jumping in and out of orbits? In a conductor? Metals have many free electrons, which can move easily in an electric field. There are so many that individual electrons do not have to move very fast in order to sustain the current, that is charge per time passing some point along the wire.

[netfences]

Sound right?

The mega post you made guessing my intentions with this amp project have me believing you have somehow tapped into my consciousness. I feel totally channeled

Scalar weapons are designed by the principle of multiplying the frequency of a polarized (near 0 angle pulse segments) by filiing the gaps with more, synchronized linear power segments.

Not 0 degree but 90, it's the amplitude that creates the disruptive damage and that's what you want to stack.

Are you listening to these amplifiers in their linear range, or are you clipping on peaks? GNF is a disaster if you clip, but there is no reason to do so since powerful SS amplifiers are readily available.

I was describing my impression of GNFB in stereo recording playback so yes, only listening in the linear range. A few amps were very good indeed but some, like the highly esteemed Halcro, only sound satisfying to me with relatively flabby vinyl source material. I can't fault it for soundstage or timbral accuracy, it just didn't distinguish itself. In many regards, it is just an overly blameless amp and the music suffers because of it. I hate to pick on that amp alone because many others that share its design philosophy produce the same lack of involvement for me. What they all have in common is generous use of GNFB. By the way, why do you assume the electrons in a metallic domain structure are free? In what way are they different from other crystalline and non crystalline structures?

[eschertron]

By the way, why do you assume the electrons in a metallic domain structure are free? In what way are they different from other crystalline and non crystalline structures?

My brush with quantum theory was limited, but what I understood is that if the electrons are not 'free', then it takes some energy added to the electron to make it free before it can leave the electron field around the atomic nucleus*. Unlike an LED, a length of wire does not [edit: I mean to say some of the electrons in the copper atoms do not] need to raised to a zero energy state before conducting. Therefore, already at a zero energy state, the electrons can freely be shared.

*and of course, when that energy is released, it produces quanta of light energy, photons of specific frequencies.

[Dave H]

...some, like the highly esteemed Halcro, only sound satisfying to me with relatively flabby vinyl source material. I can't fault it for soundstage or timbral accuracy, it just didn't distinguish itself. In many regards, it is just an overly blameless amp and the music suffers because of it. I hate to pick on that amp alone because many others that share its design philosophy produce the same lack of involvement for me.

It's probably because you didn't spend enough on your IEC cable. Try one of these

"The Dragon mains cable is an experience in itself! Adding to the already extraordinary clarity and timing experienced with the Funnel-web and the sweet top end and balanced enhancements added by the Scorpion but now adds massive improvement in complete power and authority, increased natural detail, increased stabilty to the already impressive sound stage and the real character of all Dragon products which is a simply sublime bass response. The Dragon Mains Cable is Merlin Cable's Signature Product!!"

Lord give me strength

[netfences]

It's probably because you didn't spend enough on your IEC cable. Try one of these...

Silly man, every serious audiophile knows those are completely useless without the Jack Bybee beads

I think what happened here can be safely characterized as off topic. To get us back to the garden, may I have some suggestions of dominant 2nd order HD SS (chip or discreet) amps?

[Mike Sulzer]

By the way, why do you assume the electrons in a metallic domain structure are free? In what way are they different from other crystalline and non crystalline structures?

Abundant free electrons is what distinguishes a conductor from an insulator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_conductor

"In physics and electrical engineering, a conductor is an object or type of material that allows the flow of an electrical current in one or more directions. Materials made of metal are common electrical conductors. Electrical current is generated by the flow of negatively charged electrons, positively charged holes, and positive or negative ions in some cases.
In order for current to flow, it is not necessary for one charged particle to travel from the machine producing the current to that consuming it. Instead, the charged particle simply needs to nudge its neighbor a finite amount who will nudge its neighbor and on and on until a particle is nudged into the consumer, thus powering the machine. Essentially what is occurring here is a long chain of momentum transfer between mobile charge carriers; the Drude model of conduction describes this process more rigorously. This momentum transfer model makes metal an ideal choice for a conductor as metals, characteristically, possess a delocalized sea of electrons which gives the electrons enough mobility to collide and thus effect a momentum transfer."

[R.G.]

To all the other members who found their sensibilities offended by the introduction of this new pseudoscience,
[...]
I will also remind you that the same term was directed at Albert Einstein when his miracle year papers were circulated to the academic establishment.

Bot.

To other readers, I heartily recommend Michael Schermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things", subtitled "Pseudo-Science, Superstition, and Bogus Notions of Our Time". I especially liked the section on "Problems with Pseudoscientific Thinking", from which I'll now excerpt:
Anecdotes do not make a science
Without corroborative evidence from other sources, or physical proof of some sort, ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred are no better than ten.

Bold statements do not make a claim true
[...] the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily well-tested the evidence must be.

Heresy does not equal correctness
They laughed at Copernicus. They laughed at the Wright brothers. Yes, well they laughed at the Marx brothers. Being laughed at does not mean you're right.

Burden of proof
Who has to prove what to whom? The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proving to the experts and to the community at large that his or her belief has more validity than the one that almost everyone else accepts.

[Mike Sulzer]

Burden of proof
Who has to prove what to whom? The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proving to the experts and to the community at large that his or her belief has more validity than the one that almost everyone else accepts.

So the key talent of the successful "conspiracy theorist" is to turn that burden of proof around in the mind of the reader, listener, or whatever the means of communication to the "victim" is, appearing to make it the burden of the evil establishment to prove existing knowledge.

Any opportunity to explain and discuss actual science should always be used, even if the opportunity is created by someone with opposing goals.

[Mike Sulzer]

An example relative to this forum:

The "conductivity" inside a vacuum tube is different from that a metal? Ignore collisions and think of momentum transfer directly from the electric field in the tube to the electrons. Does a vacuum diode obey ohm's law, or something else? (What is the V-I relationship?)

[netfences]

Although I object to being tagged as a conspiracy theorist, I do like people to assert their own authority. There is far too much deference and far too many observed phenomena that are unsatisfactorily explained. Depending on the resonant field the atoms are in or the voltage potential/environment they are exposed to, all or none of the electrons can be freed from any atom. Even air, which is close to a perfect insulator will carry electricity in certain conditions. We even have examples of this in nature with lightning, static discharge, etc.

[Mike Sulzer]

Although I object to being tagged as a conspiracy theorist, I do like people to assert their own authority. There is far too much deference and far too many observed phenomena that are unsatisfactorily explained. Depending on the resonant field the atoms are in or the voltage potential/environment they are exposed to, all or none of the electrons can be freed from any atom. Even air, which is close to a perfect insulator will carry electricity in certain conditions. We even have examples of this in nature with lightning, static discharge, etc.

The light always comes on when the switch is flipped because the free electrons are always there.


"Depending on the resonant field the atoms are in or the voltage potential/environment they are exposed to, all or none of the electrons can be freed from any atom."


^^^^^^^^^^^

This is exactly the kind of irrelevant statement that conspiracy theorists, etc., make. So why claim that you do not like to be called one, and then show that you are?

[R.G.]

Ohm's law applies only crudely to the conduction inside a vacuum tube. The conductivity of a vacuum, leaving aside the quantum-mechanical sea of virtual particles, is zero. No charge carriers, no charge carried. The virtual particle sea is not an effective contributor of charge carrying particles under normal (i.e. classical physics) conditions. Conduction in a vacuum has to start by introducing some kind of particle to carry charge. Those can be electrons most easily, but they can also be protons or other charge particles if you have a handy particle accelerator to goose those particles out into the vacuum to move them. No tubes I know of work on the basis of protons or other charged particles. Electrons are all we can use, practically.

This is changed by the cathode literally boiling electrons off the cathode by raising their thermal energy until it exceeds the work function energy of the material on the surface. Tungsten was used in early tubes because it could withstand the temperature needed to boil off electrons. Later, thorium was found to reduce the work function of tungsten, so thoriated tungsten filaments became common. Later, it was found that some metal oxides (barium and strontium come to mind, maybe others) reduced the work function energy even more so that the emission of electrons from a cathode was useful, even generous, at temperatures which were only a dull orange-red glow, not the yellow-white of tungsten and thoriated tungsten cathodes. So the charge-carrier electrons were introduced into the vacuum thermally.

With no other E-field or M-field influences, the electrons boil off the cathode into a cloud of electrons; the cloud increases until the pull of the now-more-positive cathode and the repulsion of the cloud of electrons forces a balance between electrons boiled off and electrons forced back into the surface.

Introducing a remote (to an electron... ) plate with a positive voltage means that the outermost electrons in the electron cloud near the cathode get attracted to the plate, and are accelerated to the plate by the E-field pull of the positive plate. Electrons wham into the plate and stick, get sucked into the plate as charge carrier movement - current. The whamming into the plate is not a clean process, and is itself subject to some fancy manipulation and math, which is why we have not only triodes, but tetrodes, pentodes, and beam power tubes.

For a two-terminal vacuum tube, a diode, the math involved in attracting electrons from the cathode to a remote plate gives a 3/2 power ratio of current to applied voltage if I remember correctly. I can go look it up if need be. Inserting a negative-voltage grid between the cathode and plate gives a triode. Decades ago, I had to derive the field intensity around wires in a grid in a vacuum tube. It hurt.

So if I'm answering your question, I think the conductivity inside a vacuum tube is like many non-linear resistances. The conductivity varies depending on the external conditions applied to the tube. For mostly linear resistances like metals, the math works out so that the relationship of current to applied voltage is remarkably linear, only departing from linear at extreme conditions. In fact, one of the hallmarks of an element being a metal is the existence of a notional sea of more or less free electrons shared by all the atoms, so that the charge carriers are already there in place and relatively free so that applied fields just have to do the work of moving them along. The "work of moving them along" amounts to the heat losses in the material that electrical flow causes.

The disconnect between the speed of current flow and the speed of charge carrier flow that our resident bot seems hung up on was a big event in both a classical physics class and a semiconductor physics class that I was extruded through. The prof sat us down and listened to our complaints about how it didn't make sense that electron movement was slower than electrical signals, and more or less gently explained about the field velocity and the electrons-bumping-into-electrons stuff. Took a whole lecture period for the classical physics version. The semiconductor physics class was stuck on the point that semiconductors have two kinds of charge carriers: electrons, which carry negative charge, of course, and "holes", those being the absence of an electron in an atom's outer shell (this mattering because in semiconductors, the electrons are more tightly held to atoms than in electron-promiscuous metals). The problem is then that in semiconductor current flow, you have to account for both electron flow and hole flow. It's simple to think of an adjoining electron dropping into a hole and thereby moving the "hole" by one atom. The problem comes when you do the experimental work to measure the speed with which charge carriers actually move in the semiconductor crystal. The obvious idea is that electrons and holes move at the same speed, since both of them are actually the movement of electrons.

Not so. When measured, the speed of electron flow is DIFFERENT from the speed of hole flow. This has to be accounted for in the design of semiconductors. I heard enough of this to decide that I did not want a career in either theoretical or applied semiconductor physics, thank you.

One problem with the whole pseudoscientific stance is that we don't need wild expositions of things which are counter to classical observed reality. What lies underneath real, classically observable reality is quite strange enough. And that's a burden that the pseudoscience types don't get - any wild story about something that science has missed has to also explain how the past few centuries of independently observed phenomena happened under the new, wild theory. The idea of "reduction to classical" breaks a lot of pseudoscience. It's also why things as outrageous as quantum physics can stand - the little we do understand about quantum physics DOES reduce to classical, so we don't have to throw out all of physics from zero to deal with the new knowledge.

[R.G.]

Although I object to being tagged as a conspiracy theorist, I do like people to assert their own authority.

So far, I've not put you in the psuedoscience bucket. You asked a real, if difficult to quantify question. I was absolutely straight about the answer - if you can tell me what "immediacy" means in some more technical terms, I can help figure out how to design some of it in for you.

There is far too much deference and far too many observed phenomena that are unsatisfactorily explained.

There are far too many observed phenomena that are unsatisfactorily explained. But we have a way to explain phenomena that has worked for a long, long time: observe the phenomena; write down the observation; determine how to measure what's going on; accumulate a lot of reliable measurements and then start thinking about what might be causing them; form theories of the phenomena, then GO TEST THE THEORIES and be sure that what you have observed and what is tested agree. Discard the theories that don't work.

I read the following on the web site "Atomic Rockets" under the topic of "Respecting Science". I suspect that it was from somewhere else, but I like the idea well enough to except it here:

Scientists do not coddle ideas.
They crash test them.
They run them into a brick wall at sixty miles per hour and examine the pieces.
If the idea is sound, the pieces will be those of the brick wall.

Depending on the resonant field the atoms are in or the voltage potential/environment they are exposed to, all or none of the electrons can be freed from any atom.

It's even better than that. Electrons can be freed from any atom by sufficient field strength. It does not have to be a resonant field, a static field of enough intensity will do fine. In fact, the field strength needed to pull off outer-shell electrons is very well known and tabulated quantity. The movement of outer valence shell electrons into and out of the shell is the fundamental basis of much of chemistry.

The phenomena of electron emission by field strength is the basis of one of my favorite semiconductor devices that exist but is almost completely unused - the field emission triode. These are made by using semiconductor fabrication techniques to make a "bed of nails" on a semiconductor substrate. The "nails" are atomically sharp spikes. Any charge on the substrate results in intense field concentrations on the points. Two circles of metalization (or imbedded heavy doping) surround the bed of nails. When the outer ring is made positive and the bed of nails negative, at some voltage, electrons are spit off the points of the nails because the field strength exceeds the energy needed to remove the electron. They are then attracted to the outer ring. The inner ring can be made negative, and perform the function of a control grid in a triode. It think they're really cool. Look them up. Field emission triodes.

Electrons can also be freed by increasing the effective temperature of the atom. This inserts enough energy into the electron to move it to higher and higher energy shells outside the nucleus until at some point, it's no longer "attached" to the electron at all. Plasmas are in fact a state of matter where all the electrons have been stripped off the nucleus, not just the ones in the outermost shells.

And in metals, the outer electrons are so loosely held to atoms that if there are many adjacent metal atoms, the electrons are better viewed as shared between them all, only held in the lump of metal by general field concerns that if they left, the electrons would be pulled back in by the resulting positive charge of their having left.

This is not a mystery. It's extremely, extremely well documented. It is one of the things that freshmen in the sciences must deal with in the equivalent of Physics 101 and Chemistry 101.

Even air, which is close to a perfect insulator will carry electricity in certain conditions. We even have examples of this in nature with lightning, static discharge, etc.

I could not agree more. Air is an insulator until its inside a field sufficient to rip the outer electrons off. This is the basis of the Van de Graaff generator. Works great. Highly predictable, highly replicable by disinterested third parties. Not unexplained at all.

Actually the big round terminals on the VDG generator are an illustration of the "sharp points = high field intensity" observations on the Field Emission Triode (also know as "the other FET") construction. The round knobs are to keep the field intensity DOWN long enough to build up large voltages for long arcs. Much more showy.

Edit:
@ netfences: I'm editing to reinforce that I think you have a valid question, and that I think you're not tied to the other junk that's go on. I think you're really a searcher for what's real in two very complicated and overlapping fields of technology: electronics and human psychoacoustics. I encourage you to keep looking, but work really hard at finding the real facts. Real facts can be observed by disinterested observers, and real phenomena can be replicated. Go find the truth.