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Aural Heaven -- iPod And Analog
Ant writes This Wired News article says there is aural magic in the combination of the very old with the very new: iPod through an old radio or tube-driven amplifier gives it a special warmth and atmosphere. '50-year-old Takeyuki Ishii insists the antique equipment creates an atmosphere that has been forgotten. The softer tones ease listeners and make them feel warm and relaxed.'"
Not that tubes ever went away in audio, but more and more manufacturers are putting them into equipment "because it's a tube / for the sake of it". Take the Korg Triton (one of the more popular music workstations), of which an updated model released around January had a tube built in (to add "warmth")...
I beg to differ. Static and Magnetic planar speakers, as well as conventional voice-coil and paper cone speakers are vastly better today than fifty years ago. Stronger magnets, stiffer, lighter cones, better crossovers, all add up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think there will always be people who prefer that sound. I have a digital guitar effects box that does pretty good distortion, but personally, nothing does distortion like a good tube amp. I'm only 32 BTW, so I hardly grew with tubes. But then again, I don't know may people who'd describe electric guitars distorted through tube amps as "warm, soothing".
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
I've always preferred playing my MP3s through my low-end tube amp (an Antique Sound Labs MG-SI15DT, which has two small 12AX7 preamp tubes and two KT88 power tubes, and my speakers are Mordaunt-Short Music Series)... it sort of smooths out the MP3s, and I don't notice the sampling rate even if it's bad... if I play MP3s through my Sony A/V receiver the sound is either too muddy or too tinny... but through the tube amp it sounds vibrant and lively. Sometimes pure digital audio sounds too sharp and isn't easy on the ears. Analog audio tends to flow.
Some people don't like tube amps for the reason that they "color" the audio too much and it's not a perfect reproduction (fidelity)... but lots of people have a soft spot for the "warmer" sound... lots of people even like the sound of old vinyl records (even though vinyl records have horrible fidelity, the studios have to mix the audio specially for vinyl records different from how they do for CDs, because there are certain audio ranges that vinyl is horrible at reproducing -- I think it's the high end).
But one thing can't be denied and that's that tube amps look damn cool, and are fascinating technology... the tubes are out in the open and you can see inside of them how intricate they are, and they usually glow orange in the middle and some tubes have a blue haze (I've noticed this particularly in Svetlana brand KT88's once they've worn in a bit).
Shipped.../ colsa/p ://www.macminute.com/2004/09/13/imacg5/
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles
now shipping...
http://www.macnn.com/news/26226
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In Stock...
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In response to...
(Don't think it'll be a good quarter for us shareholders, though the sharemarket yet doesn't seem to have noticed Apple can't supply a G5 Dual 2.5 / iMac / XServe for love or money.)
For as long as there have been transistors there has been debate between solid-state supporters and tube supporters. The same two camps squared off years later in an analog versus digital debate. If you need to enjoy your music by looking at graphs created by test equipment, then solid state and digital will be the best solution for you. If you want to enjoy your music by looking at the pretty tubes glowing in your stereo rack and esoteric explanations to your friends as to your audio insanity, then tubes and Vinyl are all you. If you want to enjoy your music by LISTENING to it, grab your favorite CDs and Vinyl and head to a real audio shop. Any good (and I don't like this term, but its what most would call it) high-end audio shop will have good people to help you find equipment that will help you enjoy the music. Trust your ears.
...) they are not going to tell you that, because the Monks just signed on with the magazine for a $50k advertising deal over the next year.
Take what you read in magazines with a grain of salt. Magazines are there to sell adds, so when the new $10,000 amp that was built of unobtanium and blessed by Buddhist Monks sounds very similar to an amp made by a small but quality high end manufacturer in Buffalo (or Toronto, or LA, or London, or
Spend your money your speakers. You can invest a lot of money in source equipment, amplification, and cables, but if you have a $100 pair of speakers from Radio Shack you have a $100 system. There have been no breakthroughs in amplifier technology in about 30 years, but speaker materials and design have changed greatly.
Disclosure: I used to work in the high performance home audio industry (I've been out for about 6 years now). I got a chance to listen to a lot of great gear, and meet a lot on interesting audio engineers (some of which had there heads up the arses). I like tubes, but I agree they are not as accurate as solid state. I have often used a tube type CD player or pre amp, but prefer the better control offered by solid-state amplifiers. In my opinion this combination will get you the open and smooth soul of the tube with the slam and dynamics of a solid-state amp. I own about 1000 CDs, but if I really want to experience music, I listed to Vinyl. Digital music (weather a red book CD, audio stream, or I pod) takes the mechanical action of sound, cuts it up in to lots of little pieces, and puts it back together again. Vinyl is a direct mechanical representation of a mechanical process. Less is lost (even if it is a pain to deal with a record compared to a CD).
Trust your ears. They are the best test equipment money can't buy.
Running an audio source through a tube amp creates tube-amp like sound! WHAT A BREAKTHROUGH.
What's this got to do with an iPod?
Yes, tube amps have a distinctly different sound than solid state gear. Yes, many people find the colorations of a tube amp pleasant. Most people do, in fact. I know I do.
Does that mean tubes are more accurate at reproducing sound? Not at all. But when it comes to the natural harmonics introduced by the amplifiers... tubes are much more pleasing than solid state gear.
An amp based on either technology can be engineered very thoroughly to give a flat, neutral uncolored response... but guess what.. that doens't necessary sound BETTER to the listener.
Remember, accuracy can be measured, but what sounds GOOD is *purely* subjective.
Perfect example: I have 128kbps mp3s that sound much better on my little ipod headphones than my $800 reference headphones. I know the reference cans are more accurate, and that they are letting me hear how crappy the mp3 truly is.. but the overall effect is that the shitty headphones make it sound better.
It's comparatively easy to make a low gain stage with decent linearity from either tubes or transistors. It's not so easy to make a stable tube amp with 120db open loop gain as it is a transistor amp, which means a very good tube amp might have an order of magnitude more THD (ie .02% at 1khz vs .002%) - meaningless unless you spend your time listening for sine harmonics. However, where it counts, it's relatively easy to make a tube amp with 20db or so open loop gain that, with just a tiny bit of feedback (maybe even just a db or two) will be very stable and have very good power response... and low THD (as if that was what mattered).
The seventies and eighties saw a home hifi market flooded with crap gear from japan (Manufacturers like Sansui and Sony and Kenwood and Pioneer) that boasted incredibly low THD... and provided its owners incredibly bad sound.
I posted this in a totally unrelated article some time ago, but it is very much on topic now. ;-)
And yes, audiophiles do quite a bit of blind testing. Or at least scientist audiophiles do. I was totally blown away when i tested different power supplies, power cords, interconnect cables, and speaker cables on the same system. I basically figured most of the hype was total nonsense. I mean, why the heck would you have to burn in a *cable*? Turns out that you can easily tell the difference in a blind test even though such a test is difficult to arrange - you basically have to have one guy rewiring stuff and one guy blindfolded listening. We were shocked that the differences predicted by the audiophile crowd were mostly pretty damn obvious. I still dont *understand* why some of these differences exist, though others do make some sense.
Actually, I have been messing about with audiophile quality mp3 systems for some time now. I know, I know, it sounds like an oxymoron, but despite popular opinion it is possible to get really impressive sound with high quality variable bit rate mp3s.
It turns out that the secret is in the quality of the sound card you use and the quality of the D to A converter. Using a studio quality soundcard with digital audio output and a nice D to A (I am quite pleased with Theta, but there are other excellent manufacturers) together make high quality variable bit rate mp3s sound quite good on an audiophile quality system.
To give you some idea of how good, I have a very nice transport (CD player for the uninitiated), and direct comparison of CD, SACD, and high quality mp3s reveals only minor flaws. The most significant is that the mp3s sound slightly 'cleaner' than the CD or SACD versions. This is not a good thing for the purist who desires to hear the sound *exactly* as it was recorded, but many less discriminating listeners actually prefer the mp3 versions.
Somewhat off topic, of course, but it is interesting to me that you can indeed build near audiophile quality sound systems based around mp3s. Not something there is much discussion about in audiophile communities as yet, but as digital encoding gets better i suspect more and more audiophiles will cross the 'digital divide' that currently exists. For instance, the same sort of thing happened with the transition from vinyl to CD and SACD- even though some diehard purists still sing the praises of vinyl, most audiophile folks now agree that SACD is the 'best' sound currently available.
Another selling point is that truly digital recordings stored on random access media do not degrade over time, while the CDs and SACDs in your collection do so demonstrably. Interesting stuff.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
older people (30years and older) want tube amplifiers. So why is that? It's because of the things the people grew up with.
30? Dude, I'm almost 38, and when I was really little (6-8 years old), I had a Winnie-The-Pooh transistor radio that took an ordinary 9-volt battery. You need to go back a little further to find people who feel all comfy from their tube-filled childhood.
With storage as cheap as it is today using lossless encoding seems like a no-brainer if you are into sound quality.
As an added benefit you can reencode for portables at an appropriate bit rate ( small flash player for running gets ~128, iPod gets ~200) and you are future proof as you can reencode to new formats if/when they catch on.
You're making too much of it, really. It's the same exact audio in two channels.
In the case of an ISDN link, you have two digital circuits. The modem is capable of doing stereo by devoting a circuit to each channel. Doing this gives you roughly FM-Radio quality audio. If you combine the two circuits, you get very high quality mono -- near CD quality, but you get that output on both the left and the right channels.
Yep. Almost like you said, BUT you remebered them the wrong way. Tubes produce even harmonics and solid state amps (where are not really talking about digital amps here..) produce odd order harmonics.
Here are some nice looking articles:
Herron Audio: TAS tube article
Vacuum Tube Primer
The Sound of the Machine - The Hidden Harmonics behind THD
Store with salt
Close, but you have your harmonics backwards. The human ear finds even order distortion (harmonics) to be euphonic (pleasing) while off order is quite discordant. Clipping is, of course, especially bad, since it's the beginnings of a squarewave, which is the sum of an infinite number of odd harmonics.
Tubes and some FET topologies produce mostly even-order distortion. Poorly designed digital stuff and overdriven transistors (clipping) generate odd-order gak.
'Digital amps' (class D, T or I in this case) use a PWM signal that gets passed through a set of low pass filters to remove the majority of the harmonics. Unfortunately, the use of PWM instead of brute force analog does indeed have a measurable effect on the sound, especially when an amplifier is compromised somehow (by design or implementation) or run near the limit of it's performance envelope. There are some very good switching amps on the market, but to my ears (as a recording engineer, musician, and electrical engineer) there are still advantages to giant linear power supplies and dozens of transistors.
Warm to me generally equates to more abundant lower mids (400Hz-ish, +/- a few hundred), while bright is, as you said, an overabundance of HF content.
Your mileage will most certainly vary.
-dave
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
And yes, audiophiles do quite a bit of blind testing. Or at least scientist audiophiles do. Unfortunately, this is not true. Far too few people do blind testing, and when they do, they are often unable to tell the difference between electronics. There is a guy named Richard Clark who will give anyone $10,000 if they can tell the difference between two car audio amplifiers that have their levels and distortion matched exactly. I think you have to guess correctly 9 out of 10 times, and you can compare anything -- tube vs. solid state, $8,000 McIntosh vs. $29 WalMart, etc. Thousands have tried, and no one has succeeded yet. Stereophile magazine did a similar study several years ago, and their participants could only tell the difference between two amps 52% of the time, well within a margin of error. The Tice Clock (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i e=UTF-8&q=%22tice+clock%22) is a $10 Radio Shack wall clock that was sold for $500 because it was modified to control the quantum behavior of electricity and thereby improve sound. Seriously. Plug it into the room with your stereo, and your music instantly becomes more open and your soundstage gains depth. Of course, the inventors have no scientific explanation of how they control the quantum behavior of electrons. Nonetheless, thousands of listeners and professionals heard a difference. Psychoacoustics are a powerful force.
This is not to say that source units (like an iPod) and amplifiers make no difference. Tube amps provide a degree of euphonic distortion that give them their "warmth". But cables, power cords, etc -- I'd appreciate it if you could link to one blind test that shows a noticable difference between these.
I used to work part time for a local computer store (mostly for the employee discount at local computer shows) and one time I was wandering through the RMA area and saw an 8' long table covered with hard drives. They were stacked 3-4 deep and covered the table so completely you couldn't see the surface. I asked one of the techs and he told me that table was exclusively for RMA'ed Western Digital Caviar drives that were waiting to be returned to WD. I said "I thought we stopped carrying WD drives?" and the tech replied "and that table shows why"...
That was a few years ago and I have heard that since then WD has got their act together and that current WD drives don't have the same problems, but I haven't bought a WD drive to check that out.
I purchased a new 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax drive this weekend to supplement the Maxtor 80GB in my primary system that has run pretty much 24/7 without a drive failure for 2+ years (knock on wood)...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
FWIW, I'm 34 and we had tubes in our TV and stereo when I was little. I believe the TV was a HeathKit. It was color and it t had an FM wireless remote, too! When you changed the channel with the remote it would actually turn the channel knob.
We also had a reel-to-reel tape recorder with tubes in it. (I've still got that, it still worked last time I tried it.) We would rock out to "Godspell" and Elton John and stuff like that. My dad had built two mono amps (for stereo) from kits and you could see the tubes pulsate when you really cranked it up.
I remember talking about "a tube being out" and going to the drug store to use the tube tester to check them out. (The tube testers rocked - they had a whole bunch of knobs on them, and looked very cool to me at 5 years old...) Eventually my dad got his own tube tester so he could check stuff out himself. By about 1980 or so I don't think we had anything in active use that had tubes in it.
I guess the moral of the story is that it was probably the early to mid 70s when solid state started making a big appearence. By 1980 I imagine that tubes were hard to find.
Well that's a retarded comparison to make. Of course lamp cord isn't going to produce a quality sound -- there's nothing in their design conducive to carrying an audio signal. A comparison between $20-a-spool speaker wire from Radio Shack and $20-an-inch audiophile speaker wire would be more informative, and less noticeable.
Actually, you can get really good sound from lamp cord, it all depends on what kind.
As an EE these type of nonsense comparisons always piss me off.
For the most part, copper is copper and you're better off with 12 AWG "lamp cord" than 16 AWG "monster cable".
It may not be as pretty, and won't be as impressive to all your friends, but it sounds just as good, really.
Life is too short to proofread.
I took a look at this page, and while the plasma speakers are very cool, I'm not sure they make sense as speakers. Given that these units go down to 700 Hz or 1 kHz, they are in competition with a 2" horn/driver combo. The plasma is supposed to have high linearity, but it's max output is 107 dB. A 2" horn on a driver can have a sensitivity of 107. That means the horn, with 1 watt, would be as loud as the plasma, full blast. Which means the horn/driver will be pretty linear - nonlinear response occurs at higher power levels.
OK, looking at the JBL 2447 for example, I admit that it's frequency response is nowhere near as smooth as the plasma. But in practice it is usually electronically equalized, with great results. That's because frequency response can be fixed in DSP/electronics, but power limitations and distortion cannot. The horn/driver will have a lot more headroom to add punch to music.
Of course the plasma is super-cool.