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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.
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.
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.