I think there are two different philosophies going on here. The Audio Note ‘gentlemen’s’ amp tested in Stereophile a while back offered c. 10W out into 8 ohms and not much above that showed distortion at >2-3%. It won ‘Amplification Product of the Year’. The asking price IIRC is c. $19 000. And they aren’t the only ones offering this kind of stuff. Even the Linn Klout at >200 W into 8 ohms isn’t much better than 0.5% although unusually the PSRR is quite good, unlike a lot of stuff that clearly has layout and wiring programs evidenced by the noise floors that are full of mains harmonics. IMD performance also an issue in a lot of these offerrings.
Why are commercial amps like this being built and sold? One reason is these companies peddle the ‘feedback is bad’ mantra and their whole marketing focus is on dissing good engineering and bigging up zero feedback amplifiers with their manifest faults. Great if that floats your boat, but not great if your mindset is ‘a piece of wire with gain’.
So, no, most commercial audio companies won’t be copying some of the cutting edge stuff being done in the DIY space and that’s a loss for audiophiles everywhere IMV.
It's remarkable that you're putting forward the Wolverine here. Ostripper based the Wolverine on the HK680, so it is debatable whether the Wolverine is a DIY-design. In any case, it is a bad idea to compare production units with amplifiers optimized under laboratory conditions that are incompletely constructed. Even the measuring setup was 'optimized' to report the lowest possible THD. Something Bonsai strongly opposed to in another thread.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/search/1613931/?q=680&c[users]=ostripper&o=relevance
The only Wolverine I know of, that contains a significant share of original DIY design is my own. With it's micro-controller based household circuit that I designed myself.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/search/1613931/?q=680&c[users]=ostripper&o=relevance
The only Wolverine I know of, that contains a significant share of original DIY design is my own. With it's micro-controller based household circuit that I designed myself.
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Are you saying that top commercial designs are all unique circuits, that share nothing with DIY audio designs? Hardly possible. You can’t design an amplifier circuit today that was not designed before, by someone else, with just small differences.
Don’t know details about circumstances around Wolverine reference measurements, but if results are not repeatable with many other builds, someone should point that out with hard data.