Why do audiophiles shun feedback in amplifiers?

Kijanki, thanks for pointing that out on the Stereophile article. One famous amplifier designer told me there is no such thing as totally zero negative feedback. Even the tubes themselves can have built in feedback.

Learsfool, I know "tight" is not a term most musicians use. But we audiophiles (and closet musician on the side such as myself) have our own set of terminology that will befuddle most musicians. We use many different terms to describe the similar, if not the same, thing (eg, instrument tone, tonality, timbre, overtones, harmonics).

Hi Dracule1,
I `ve never read or been told that NFB exists within a tube`s internal/intrinsic construction.I don`t believe that"every amplifier" has NFB. I`m not an engineer nor a designer of audio components but I think some of them would disagree with your friends statement.When people talk of NFB it`s in terms of deliberate insertion into a circuit either globally or local loops.

But really it`s just what sound we all prefer.You like some NFB in your amps circuit and that`s fine.What ever no or zero NFB is, that`s what sounds best to me when properly implemented.This has been an interesting thread and I appreciate the various points of view.
Rgards,

NFB....love it or hate it.

Most things occur in shades of grey, not pure black and white.

Hi Kijanki - thanks for the link. I am going to have to ask one of my viola colleagues about this tomorrow! As far as I knew, the string lengths of all the instruments in the orchestra string family were approximately the same length (with the obvious exceptions of harp and piano), but that article claims this is not necessarily true of the viola. I am now wondering if this is a typically sloppy Wikipedia reference to viols, used in early music groups, which are of many different sizes, or if it does indeed apply to orchestral violas, which I tend to doubt. I will report back.

@Dracule - yes, audiophiles use quite a few terms somewhat differently than musicians do. My personal pet peeve is "neutral," LOL! But there are others, even such seemingly self-explanatory words as "mid-range." This is a very misleading term to a musician unfamiliar with how audiophiles use it, as it turns out that the vast majority of frequencies produced by acoustic instruments fall well within what most audiophiles call the midrange, though audiophiles will often disagree on exactly what constitutes the midrange. Other obvious candidates are "pace" and "timing." I have seen some very bizarre discussion of those two terms in particular on audiophile boards.