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Tubes vs Transistors: An Audible Difference?
cgenman writes "Are those vaccuum tubes worth the extra price? This paper, a transcript of a speech to the Audio Engineering Society of New York, indicates so, though the reason is surprising: Overloaded tubes behave better.
While the speech itself is from the early 70's, the paper takes on new importance with the recent trend in louder is better music."
The recent trend in "louder is better." Did I just read that? The recent trend? Since the first real Rock and Roll music appeared approaching, 60 years ago now, louder has been better. That's a "recent" trend?
If part of being better includes consistanly sounding the same, then glass audiophiles have to tuck their tales between their legs. Tubes wear out. As they wear out, their sound qualities change. Who's to say that the 'changed' sound is desireable? Maybe it's an improvement...that's the problem; it's not cosistent.
Regardless of which one you feel is more accurate in its source reproduction, solid state devices have the advantage in that they pretty much (not 100%) maintain whatever sound characteristic they start with.
How does a speech from the 70s, discussing how better "behaved" tubes are, have relevance today? Transistor technology has had 3 decades to grow into a more stable, mature platform for audio, and we understand a great deal more about the nature of sound and the equipment producing that sound.
Digging up an ancient speech which probably SPARKED the religious war in the first place is idiotic, in my opinion.
What's next? Will we dig up some argument from the 1880s about the superiority of DC-delivered electricity?
Better for whom? The average listener won't be able to tell the difference, this is like how theres a few nutbags such as myself that still enjoy listening to vinyl. It can just sound better sometimes.
Also how relevant is this? 30 years ago, we've got all kinds of DSP going on now and very efficient transistor amps putting out a boatload of power before they become strained.
The problem with the louder-is-better issue is the albums themselves. They're mixed horribly. You can play them on a cheap boombox or a system costing thousands of dollars. You'll just hear the garbled shit more clearly on the multi-thousand dollar system.
Presently here, but not there.
This discussion is a valid one to have, regardless of how many time's it's been brought up, because the aspects of what makes sound pleasing or interesting have little to do with a list of output-section distortion numbers.
It also has little to do with dollar-for-dollar comparisons of circuit cost. If an amplifier makes noises that sound better to the listener, then they are a better solution the one which has a less good sound quality.
Unless you're talking about car audio. Then, apparently, 43,000-watt amplifiers are only $200 at the local Car Audio Mart, and the buyers care little about output quality.
Bob Carver did this already. If I remember correctly, it's the increaed resistance from a tube amp using output transformers that creates the 'soft' sound that characterizes glass audio.
Carver created a solid state amp which pretty much mimicked a $10K tube amp and no one could tell the differencec in blind tests.
I am shocked that this old crap has no annotation from the 1990s when phychology tests proved tubes sound more appealing than solid state op-amps.
The reason ?
Odd harmonics vs EVEN Harmonics !!!!
Odd harmonic overtones sound HARSH to human brains and are an unwelcome side effect of all solid state electronic amplification.
That was new data in the 90's that this ancient speech being discussed had no idea about.
Valve amps (the original name for tube amplifiers) are basically voltage driven, so when they distort, even-order harmonics are produced (2nd, 4th, 6th, etc...) while transistor amps are current driven and produce odd-order harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc....)
I cannot believe at the time i posted this i am still the only one to point this out.
All those years of subscription to The Absolute Sound taght me at least why tubes were better and an oscilloscope visibly points out the harmonics.
I love reports that tell us what is musically "better". It reminds me of the debate over, of all things, guitar strings.
Some people (Angus Young of AC/DC, for example) swear by using new guitar strings, replacing them as soon as they get a bit worn. Others (e.g. Neil Young) won't use 'new' ones and actually have roadies break their strings in before they will play them.
(Angus also likes to use no effects pedals, while Neil loves effects. Just picking those 2 at random 'cuz I read up on them. Which is better-- straight guitar or with effects?)
Which is "better"? The answer is 'whatever gives you _your_ sound'. You like tubes, go for it! Solid state give you what you want, more power to you!
With amps, people get distracted by engineering gobblygook, but the truth is: to get 'killer tone', you need to choose your own mix. Guitar choice, strings, amps, heads, effects, EQ, there's a fucking reason you can buy a million and one of each-- there is no one right path!
You can't define sound. It's experiential*. There's no one right set of gear. There's no one best type of music. There's no one best musician. There's no best album of all time.
Freebird! Freebird!
*(sonically, you can usually define 'sucky' due to poor audio quality, but when you get into 'good' you start getting into taste as much as specs)
A.
DSP CAN NOT give you the same characteristics as a tube.
Of course, DSPs can only apply mathematical transformations to the signal, whereas tubes impart magical qualities that defy quantitization, such as warmth, openness and bredth of sound stage.
They are called vacuum tubes, but they each actually contain individual fairies, all supplying your music with a limitless supply of fairy dust.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
The problem with this is you end up with horrible range that you can't do much with. Loud sounds end up clipped so that the softer sounds can sound 'louder'. Here's why it sucks: You lose a lot of the music's quality. When I turn up this song, my stereo dac becomes the limiting factor. When you turn up crap like this, the sound waves are already clipped. The jokes on them.
People like tube amps because they add a little bit of harmonics that sounds nicer to our ears. Tubes sound 'warm' and they fail gracefully when overdriven. It's an old battle that no one will win, but most muscians go with tube amps so they can't all be wrong
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If this makes me sound like a Tube-a-phile, let me mention I'm an analog circuit designer and my profession and personal opinion that >90% of most tube-a-philes are ignorant fools. There are a handful of exceptions. Norman Koren, though he is out of the audio hobby, knows what he's talking about. His writings should be required reading and required baseline knowledge for anyone who wants to mindlessly spout off about tubes being better over transistors. He's pro-Tube, BTW. His analysis is some of the only cogent and technically correct writing I've seen on the subject. AFAIHS, most pro-Tube audiophile magazine articles are written by people without actually knowledge of or experience in analog circuit design (building one or two tube amplifiers in your garage doesn't count) so I'm always dubious but I'm open to qualified and valid arguments, either way. This question of Tube-vs.-Transistor is usually irrelevent with bad circuit design: transistor amplifiers can be as good as the best tube amplifiers and tube amplifiers can be as bad as the worst transistor amplifiers. Device technology is not some magic bullet and claiming such only demonstrates one's stupidity and ignorance.
That said, one need only look at the rise of MP3 to see that most of the population can't hear the difference if there ever was one. This is something that the RIAA complete missed. It's also something that SuperCD and AudioDVD format promoters seem to have fatally overlooked (from an MBA sense, the market cap for such formats are far smaller than they claim or seem to believe). Most environments in which we listen to music are noisy (car, office and even home), and further most of us can't hear well enough or have the ear training to discern bad from good even with moderate quality equipment. The available "channel capacity" between our audio sources and our ears is generally far less than the 16-bits dynamic range/44.1 KHz data rate due to this ambient noise floor. Add to that the channel capacity limits between our ears and brain: I had my hearing checked when I was 19 and even then I had no significant perception over 16 KHz (which is statistically "normal" for 19 yo males). I'm in my 40s now and I've noticed my hearing getting worse since that! My iPod and its MP3 are certainly lower quality than the ideal but I get to take my entire audio collection with me anywhere in the world - nothing like sitting on the beach in Nusa Dua, Bali and feeling a particularly obscure recording from your collection would be appropriate for the moment and just playing it! That and hearing fidelity limitations tends to trump the quality argument in most cases.
Golden Ear performance is a requirement for only a tiny and limited market of audiophiles and historical archival use. The claim that overload handling differences is real and potentially relevant. Mr. Koren's analysis shows (from the pro-Tube camp) distortion is often an artifact of bad circuit design rather than necessarily a device technology issue (esp read his article on negative feedback) - bad design pervades both the Tube and Transistor sides of the audio industry. Most people won't be able to tell the difference anyway, which, from an economic-forces-driving-technology-options-and-dev elopment point of view, that's all the matters in the long run. Hence most audio is IC transistor-based, and increasingly, computer/synthesizer-based anyway.
JG
This whole phenomenon is well understood today. You can buy a little "tube amp emulator", with emulations for famous tube amps. Choose your own harmonic distortion. There are product lines of amp modellers.
Most of the trouble in audio today is not tube vs. transistor vs. digital. It's from artifacts introduced during compression of the dynamic range. The real problem is the car audio listening environment, which is noisy. Radio stations need to sound good in cars. This led radio stations to compress their audio into a narrow dynamic range. People got used to this. Then, when cars got CD players, CD mixes began to be compressed like car audio. ("You don't want your record to be the softest one in the changer"). Now, most popular music is so compressed that musicians have totally lost the musical use of volume. You can't have a soft passage; it will be pumped up. Sharp attacks are clipped, so that tool has been taken away. The end result is popular music that has no texture. Background music.
Of course not, but they do contain extremely-hard-to-model non-linear responses of a bewildering variety of kinds. If they didn't, then no one would pay $500+ for DSP emulators like Native Instruments' recently released Guitar Rig, and everyone would just code their own in csound or Max/MSP.
In other words, the software market shows that it takes quite a lot to mimic the sound of classic tube amps (and speaker cabinets, etc.). So, when someone (who actually uses these things on a daily basis, for example) says that tube amps can't be matched by software, they're not necessarily saying there are magical fairies in their tubes (though some meatheaded guitarists might say that), they could be reflecting a knowledgeable point of view on the reality of the current situation.
Personally, since I use these things a lot (I do a lot of home recording) and have seen how they've progressed, I have no doubt that software will eventually match classic tube amp sounds for guitar; it may not even be that far in the future. But it ain't here now.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.