barty wrote: > For the tube naysayers, I haven't noticed any tube naysayers. Specifically, I haven't seen anyone say that tubes are good or bad, just that they are colored.
> But with modern capacitors and transformers, > tube amps can be world-class with none of the faults associated with > early designs. Remember, the tube is still one of the most linear > amplification devices known and is still used in numerous military and > satellite technologies. Satellite in space? Love a cite. Weight is critical in space, much more so than even size. Tubes are big, the trannies are huge and heavy. The military uses them because they don't suffer the same susceptibility to disruption in the case of a nuclear blast's EMI. Good audio transformers are really expensive, easily near $100 each cost, which turns into a grand per channel retail cost. Good tube rigs can sound wonderful, but just because it has a tube or two, does not mean that sounds good. Causality again. There is little chance that a $1000 stereo tube amp is anything close to linear over 20-20kHz. The "pro audio" world is flooded with low end preamps and effects that are all digital with a 12ax7 added to make it sound like ideal tubes. Doesn't happen, but does sell a lot of gear. > As for the measurement crowd, all I can say is if you can hear a > difference and you can't measure it, then you're measuring the wrong > thing. I sort of agree with this. But the problem is that no one can show the engineers what to measure that makes the sound change. And it has to be causal to be believed, not accidental. I do agree that there can be things that impact sound that are currently not measured. In general, engineers build test tools to measure what they believe are important metrics. What is measured changes as the engineers get more knowledgeable. This is why I posted the quote from Lord Kelvin, who the scientific community named the temperature scale for. In the 70s, all receivers measured the same, and so all the magazine reviewers said they all sounded the same. It nearly killed HiFi. It is fairly clear now that intermodulation distortion at frequencies above the standard 20-20kHz can have audible impact in the audible range. It wasn't measured in the last century. Of course, there was next to no signal up there, all the mics, preamps, tape recorders, etc. were bandpass limited. And most of the equalization used in studios really trashes phase relationships. We are just now learning how to measure the impact of phase. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
