Tube gear obsolete??
- Thread starter DaveyF
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Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Ralph Karsten,Owner
Atma-Sphere Music Systems
www.atma-sphere.com
I'd say he knows a thing or two about tubes
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Now that was the manufacturer who knows about tubes. As to the one who feels tubes are evil, well then.....
, "mirror, mirror on the wall"
, "mirror, mirror on the wall"
I just saw this fantastic ad on A'gon from one of the lady dealer's( Did you know that there were any lady dealers, I didn't), trying to sell a pair of ARC 610t's
Great piece of advertising....http://app.audiogon.com/listings/tu...20-power-tubes-2013-07-09-amplifiers-11109-ny
I think she has talent, LOL.
Tube amps need more Seller's like her, IMHO.
If I had written a piece like that here I would have been sensored!
I present the end of tube technology:-
And I would immediately order it, specially in Summer time! Living with tens of power tubes is not easy during the hot months if, as me, you do not have air conditioning in the listening room.
BTW, every one who has the old out-fashioned vision that tube amplifiers produce euphonic sound and slow/sluggish bass should live sometime with Ralph preamplfiers and OTL amplifiers matched with appropriate speakers. No amplifier is 100% perfect, but after listening to transients through an Atmasphere system we find that many SS amplifiers sound slow and dirty. (Post intentionally written in audiophile dialect, please do not ask me to translate it to WBF politically correct language
)
(Post intentionally written in audiophile dialect, please do not ask me to translate it to WBF politically correct language
Stunning remark, right on.
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Now that was the manufacturer who knows about tubes. As to the one who feels tubes are evil, well then.....
Dear Steve Williams: Ignorance is the mother of all wars and your level ( with all respect ) is to high, either on the tube amp output impedance/speaker impedance subject that you just can't understand. You showed in this thread that can't understand that the tube amps ( including the very well respected Atmasphere. ) mated with an speaker works as an out of control grafic equalizer. No one, including R.Karsten whom I respect a lot and whom in other forums we already discussed in deep that impedance overall subject, can't change that because the Ohm Law. Period.
In the other side your ignorance level gone in your imagination: I never designed or manufactured any single amplifier, period.
I'm posting in this forum as a real MUSIC lover. I can't say the same from you and other gentlemans here.
I hope some day you can understand what means: right and what means wrong. Till then!
Regards and enjoy the music,
R.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Enough of his absolutist nonsense tech speak drivel.
I am going to wallow in my ignorance and listen to tubes all day today, then
hit the tennis courts later in the afternoon as punishment for my lack of knowledge.
Raul, have you ever heard any of Ralph's amps in your system? I see that you use a pair of ML 20.6's to drive your ADS speaker's; replacing the 20.6's with any of Ralph's designs would be an ear opener for you, IMHO.
.
Raul has been picking these anti-tube fights for years, he never tires of them, and he never changes the tune.
Solid state devices are tone controls, too, they are just tone controls you can't control and modify in a given device. Just because you can't control them does not make them right for all situations or all ears.
After experimenting for years with about dozen solid state amps of all types (class A, Class D, class AB etc.) I have recently replaced some tubes in my main big rig system with VFET amps from the 70's. The 300b's I was using for surrounds are now Sony TA 4650 amps that I have fixed up a bit with new diodes, one of the WAVAC that I used on my bass panels in the main big rig is now a Yamaha B-2 VFET.
These have been improvements, because VFET amps are the ONLY solid state amps I have ever heard that don't screw up the tone, have fast response, natural tonal decay, outstanding 3D imaging and can also put out some muscle. The Yamaha B-2 will put out 140 watts into 4 ohms, and do transients to 280 watts. The 50 watt Wavac would clip on the bass panel often enough to be distracting, so it is now on the bass panel of the Apogee Stage in Santa Cruz and does double duty as an amazing Stax headphone amp.
I have even taken to listen to the Yamaha B-2 running my bass panels full range with computer music on occasion, and the sound is fascinating. The music unfolds like an ongoing mystery that you just want to keep exploring, which is utterly unique in my experience of solid state amps of any kind, so I guess it is possible at least for VFET and SIT types to rival tubes. The VFET amps are non-fatiguing, also unique in my experience of solid state amps, since any other SS amp I have heard, no matter how "good", seem to put the kibosh on listening after a time.
However, tubes still have their place because the VFET amps sound best with various kinds of directly heated triode preamps. This was pointed out by Srajan Ebaen on 6moons with the current SIT amps, and I agree.
Solid state devices are tone controls, too, they are just tone controls you can't control and modify in a given device. Just because you can't control them does not make them right for all situations or all ears.
After experimenting for years with about dozen solid state amps of all types (class A, Class D, class AB etc.) I have recently replaced some tubes in my main big rig system with VFET amps from the 70's. The 300b's I was using for surrounds are now Sony TA 4650 amps that I have fixed up a bit with new diodes, one of the WAVAC that I used on my bass panels in the main big rig is now a Yamaha B-2 VFET.
These have been improvements, because VFET amps are the ONLY solid state amps I have ever heard that don't screw up the tone, have fast response, natural tonal decay, outstanding 3D imaging and can also put out some muscle. The Yamaha B-2 will put out 140 watts into 4 ohms, and do transients to 280 watts. The 50 watt Wavac would clip on the bass panel often enough to be distracting, so it is now on the bass panel of the Apogee Stage in Santa Cruz and does double duty as an amazing Stax headphone amp.
I have even taken to listen to the Yamaha B-2 running my bass panels full range with computer music on occasion, and the sound is fascinating. The music unfolds like an ongoing mystery that you just want to keep exploring, which is utterly unique in my experience of solid state amps of any kind, so I guess it is possible at least for VFET and SIT types to rival tubes. The VFET amps are non-fatiguing, also unique in my experience of solid state amps, since any other SS amp I have heard, no matter how "good", seem to put the kibosh on listening after a time.
However, tubes still have their place because the VFET amps sound best with various kinds of directly heated triode preamps. This was pointed out by Srajan Ebaen on 6moons with the current SIT amps, and I agree.
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Raul, I have repeatedly offered a link to why your comment about Ohm's Law and 'graphic equalizer' is incorrect. Here it is again:
http://www.atma-sphere.com/Resources/Paradigms_in_Amplifier_Design.php
In addition, we humans have an ear/brain system that follows certain perceptual rules, which are surprisingly similar over the entire population. One of the most important is that we detect volume not by the fundamental tone but by the odd ordered harmonics of that tone. Anything that increases odd ordered harmonic distortion by even trace amounts is audible to our ears as a brightness and a hardness. This is why two amps can have the same bandwidth but one will sound bright and the other will not.
In addition Dr Herbert Melchur of Nobel Prize fame has shown that the ear/brain system has a set of tipping points. For example the brain will translate most forms of distortion into tonality. Lower orders contribute to warmth or lushness, higher orders to brightness. So one of the tipping points is where distortion as tonality is favored over actual frequency response errors or lack thereof. In essence, a perfectly flat system can sound as if a graphic EQ system has been applied on this account! In addition the brain has a method of analyzing the acoustic environment and compensating for it. This is important because no room/speaker combination will yield an actual flat character. What the take-away message here is that it is often more important to have low distortion of the kinds that the ear cares about, more so than it is to express actual flat frequency response.
One would think that understanding how the ear/brain system perceives sound would be paramount to being able to build an audio system that sounds real to the human ear. But I find that for the most part, the audio industry prefers to ignore the research of the last 45 years and collectively buries its head in the sand. This is certainly one of the reasons we have the objectivist/subjectivist debate raging on for decades. The numbers don't speak to how our ears work.
But as I mentioned before, one does not have to know anything about the sound of tubes, anything technical at all. All one has to know is that for some reason, tubes are still here long after being declared obsolete, and there are still a lot of manufacturers that use them, for high end audio, for musical instruments and for the recording studio. By comparison, side valves in internal combustion engines were declared obsolete a few years before that happened to the vaccum tube. But no-one makes a side valve motor nor has anyone done so since the 1950s.
In short, the vaccum tube failed to be inferior to the succeeding art, and thus is still around. That simple fact is more telling than any technical argument.
Edit: Tubes have been 'obsolete' now for longer than they were the only game in town, IOW for most of their history of use they have been considered obsolete. I wonder how many other technologies that are 'obsolete' continue to be used, not just for the sake of charm but for the actual improved performance? Not many, that is for sure so I think the term 'obsolete' is not really the right descriptor at all.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Why you guys continue to feed this troll is beyond me. Raul can go listen to his QSC amps or whatever and be in sonic bliss on his own.
Dear Steve Williams: No, I'm not.
No, I don't dislike per se the tubes. This is not the subject.
The subject is to reproduce faithful to the recording and well designed SS system set up put us nearest to that target.
Almost no one of you were happy with my come back to this forum and I think that because you don't like that " some one" tell you your reality tell you that you are living in an audio world that exist no more. It does not matters how many live down there.
Regards and enjoy the music,
R.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Actually not. The OP was Are Tubes Obsolete. Sorry that you don't understand that.
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