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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.'"
"The softer tones ease listeners and make them feel warm and relaxed."
Considering the heat put out. That's not an unexpected result. Throw in a big meal.
... I just finished watching a _movie_ entitled Aural Heaven.
Movie's tagline: If you're bored with the rear, try it in the ear.
I thought that was my Powerbook? :-)
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..then it's true for him. Nothing is more subjective than audio quality.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I wonder if this desire for that "warm, soothing" sound will die when those that grew up with it do as well. Is the attraction anything more than conditioning and sentimentality? Sure, a lot modern digital music could be called cold and clinical, but as a perfect representation of what the artist intended to create, is there really anything missing?
iTubes?
I dream in binary.
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."
Why the heck is he using an FM transmitter to connect the iPod to his nice tube equipment. Its one thing to use nice tube amplifiers to get a warm analog sound from a digital source (even order harmonic distortion and all that jazz), but why limit the frequency responce to FM's 50-15,000 Hz?! Good sources (such as the iPod) and good output equipment (which would presumably be hooked up to quality tube amplifiers) would benefit greatly from a full 20-20,000 KHz frequency responce!!
- Victorian telephone (wireless version)
- Mac G5 embedded in an IBM S/36 case (to give that authentic Computer feel)
- email, delivered by the postman
- the LowCost cruise liner ($25 across the Atlantic)
- not rose-coloured glasses, but B&W glasses... gives you that good ol' monochrome feeling
- the e-Quill, looks like a quill, writes like a quill, drops ink like a quill, but runs Windows XP for Quills
- the iQuill (similar, but stores 150 hours of music)
- ye old Coffee Shoppe: double espresso machiatto served in antique copper cups, by surly wenches
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Although I am a fan of the iPod (and Apple Computer) there is nothing new here: Some years ago (about 16) I spent a couple of days at Stevie Wonders studio (Wonderland) and was stunned to see a couple of CD players that had been custom built to have tubes hooked up to them. It was explained to me that this "new fangled CD technology" sounded too "crisp" and that playing the signal back through tubes warmed things up considerably. I never would have been able to tell the difference until they hooked them up to some seriously high end speakers and lo and behold, you really could tell a difference. Unfortunately I do not remember who build these CD players, but I seem to recall a $20k price tag.
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So you are saying that an mp3 on an ipod played via FM out of my old dad's radio sounds better than the ipod on it's own. Or maybe you are just trying to sell old radios?
At the rate IBM is currently (not) making PowerPC 970 processors, Apple may just have to switch to tubes to power their machines.
(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.)
Actually, plasma is the best driver, and that was used in commercial speakers back in the 1970s (I'm talking about Hill's Plasmatronic tweeters which use a DC glow discharge, not the crappier RF corona discharge designs you find more often). Take a look at the second set of response graphs on this guy's page for performance of slightly modified ones. With new technologies (MHCD instead of simple cathodes), even better is possible, with full range drivers not as unreasonable as might have seemed back then. Unfortunately Hill used helum plasma, so a helium tank was necessary. I'm working on DIY air plasma drivers, and the MHCD method makes a lot of difference. The only real problem is efficiency, as thermal relaxation is non-linear and that becomes a problem unless most of the power is bias rather than audio frequency modulation.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I think it should be possible to do the same change to the sound through a digital filter before converting it to analog. Or is there anything I'm missing?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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).
ESPECIALLY better than any compressed audio format. Just because you listen to everything through a crappy system instead of good studio monitors doesn't mean there isn't a difference.
Seriously. Listen to some Myles Davis or Gatemouth Brown through an old RCA tabletop being fed a signal from an old single ended AM modulator/exciter stage (ie "three tube transmitter"). It's been so long that AM has been out of favor very few realize nowdays how very good it can sound with "honest" frequency response up into the top octave... if you have a decent AM radio.
...perfect representation of what the artist intended to create, is there really anything missing?
This is really a matter of personal preference. I am an artist (vocal and trumpet) and feel that music should be a representation of your emotion, feelings, etc. I personally do not like music that is created digitally. (Think drum machine, synthesizer, etc.) I don't mind digital recording as long as conservative compression or no compression is used.
I like tube amps because I feel that they add a certain imperfection that gives music character. The best way I can describe the difference is to compare a tube amp and a solid state amp with this example.
A tube amp is a concert hall. The seats closer to the stage hear a different sound when compared to people sitting in the back. The sound isn't perfect but you are hearing the music directly from the source.
A solid state amp is a concert hall where you are sitting in the "perfect" seat. The instruments/people blend perfectly. There is no emotion since the blending is perfect. You do not think about the music, you just listen.
Of course equipment made today can replicate sound almost exactly but for me that's not what always matters, IMHO.
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.
In general with audio, "warm" means stronger low frequencies in the sound and "bright" means stronger highs.
/.) that digital amps tend to reproduce even harmonics and acoustic (tube) tends to reproduce odd harmonics.
I've read somewhere (probably on
Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Cue the audiophile wars.
/. editors.
The only thing worse than an Apple/Linux vs. MS zealot discussion (a good thing IMHO) is an audiophile thread. They make beligerent Microsoft hating uber-geeks look like mongoloids when they start going at it. I swear, if audiophiles were allowed to talk in person, someone would lose an arm over whether ultra high sample rate digital is better than analog, or whether vacuum tubes should be used in amplifiers or whatever...damn, I have already read too much.
Please...Spare me oh great
Sometimes I think that they throw certain stories up on the site on purpose, just to get a rise out of some people and and to get everyone else to come and watch the train wreck.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
If someone could play some tunes through their Ipod on an old radio, record it for me, and send over the MP3's, that would be awesome!
Thanks in advance!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
It is SFV (stupid fashion victim) syndrome wrapped in pseudo-science language. No more, no less.
And the pseudo-science it comes wrapped in, invariably shows massive ignorance of the real science. It invariably boils down to "uh, you can't see it on any osciloscope or signal analyzer, but transistors do this and that evil thing to your signal." Well, guess what? If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion.
And it's still ignoring that nowadays it's usually paired with transistors nevertheless. E.g., that signal went first through the transistors in the iPod. Whatever evil satanistic marks those transistors put on the signal, it's already there before it even reached the tubes.
And you talk about 8 bit or 16 bit or 24 bit quantization, which is a good topic to bring up, since they're still playing music from an iPod. It's still quantized, and it still has the artefacts from lossy MPEG or AAC encoding.
Or I've seen at least one mobo which paired an el-cheapo crap on-board sound chip with a tube, and suddenly it was audiophile equipment. As if there was some _magic_ in the tube that goes back on the causality line and also stops the sound chip from doing a crappy noisy job.
The whole bullshit is that passing _any_ signal through a tube magically makes it better. Suddenly it no longer matters that it's quantized at 8 bits, _and_ lost a ton of harmonics and gained new ones due to lossy encoding. The magical +5 tube knew what the sound should have been like, and erased all those artefacts. Basically turning lossy compression into lossless compression.
That's high magic, folks. ('Cause science and technology it sure ain't.) Don't try it at home. Only high elves certified by the Mages' Guild can infuse tubes with that kind of arcane power.
Which is all that this is. People wanting real hard to believe in basically magic. Magical tallismans which solve this or that by magic. Just because they're there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sound with even harmonic distortion is said to sound warm, that is 2f,4f,6f etc.
Sound with odd harmonic distortion sounds harsh to our ears, that is 3f,5f,7f etc.
Valves usually produce even harmonic distortion, transistors usually produce odd harmonic distortion.
Cheers
John
Perhaps the story should have been when Apple released Apple Lossless Encoder. That's the recent iPod news that makes the iPod better for audiophiles.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
...gives you softer calculations that makes you feel warm and relaxed...
..more particularly, it's the spectrum of the distortion. Tube amps usually display quite large amounts of added 2nd harmonic, which is euphonic, or 'warming' and musically concordant. However tube amps usually show far, far less odd harmonics than solid-state amps, and have a distortion spectrum that rarely extends beyond the 5th/6th harmonic at all. In contrast, solid state amps, esp. those with high negative feedback, can produce harmonics a lot further out, even though the total summed is less than the tube amp, the result has a different sound and many people can tell the two apart on this basis. BTW it is *not* due to simple differences in signal:noise ratio and the like. It appears the ear/brain hearing mechanism has a FFT component - check how the ear works, and look closely at what the cilia do. The bottom line really is that there's a *lot* the ear/brain hearing mechanism does that bald figures like 'hearing response' and 'THD' are inadequate to describe.
Tubes DO sound different than transistors. Doesn't mean they are more accurate, the opposite in fact but it isn't an unplesant sound, at least not to most people. Also before the advent of delta-sigma DACs, CD players were pretty harsh. The way the output stage worked, it was a bitch to control accurately so the sound they produced really wasn't as good as it could or should be. Later converters ixed that but I'm not sure if they were around 16 years ago, or in widespread use back then.
Even now I could see someone wanting to do this. Tubes just kind of warm sound up and take the edge off. This means they are less objectively accurate and add more distorion, but that's not necessiarly a bad thing, so do equalisers. If you are listening for pleasure you are concerned about pleasing sound, not accurate sound.
Thank you, God, for giving me ears of clay :)
Don't get me wrong. I agree with most of your post. Just running a signal through tubes doesn't make it better.
But...
You go way too far when you ridicule people who say they hear differences that can't be seen on instruments.
It's just wrong to couch this in terms of "If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion." Fact is, when someone says they hear a difference, the "thing" IS being detected. The difference IS being measured. It's being detected by the listener's ears. It's being measured on a scale defined by that listener.
The problem is that human ears are not calibrated against any objective standard. In the best cases, they are the finest detectors of subtle differences in sound available to us, far surpassing the sensitivity of the best mikes and racks of measuring equipment. They are also, unfortunately, completely non-standard in their reaction to input, subject to variation depending on a host of external and internal factors, and their results are not repeatable from instrument to instrument. That doesn't mean they are insensitive. That doesn't mean they don't actually hear a difference. It just means that the difference may or may not be obvious to another listener and may or may not be meaningful to anyone except the person listening at that moment.
I have no doubt that if you have good hearing and a love of music, you could listen to a particular orchestra play a particular piece in a particular venue many times over the course of years. That piece could then be recorded by that orchestra in that venue. As a fully-qualified judge, then, you could listen to the recordings through tubes and solid-state, planar and box speakers, etc., and be able to tell not only which ones were different and which you prefer, but which recordings and playback setups are more accurate. Just using your ears. And your results may not track in any meaningful way with the measurements produced by that bench full of instruments.
In that case, I'd consider the conclusions of the qualified listener to be far more authoritative than those of the technician who simply looks at the output of test instruments.
To translate to a more general case: By far, when everything is right, you'll be better guided in your choices of audio gear if you use your ears rather than just look at specs.
Further to getting that sound quality (based around colouration and distortion characteristics, guitar players choose speakers that colour the sound and depending on the music or the nature of guitar tone they seek will choose a speaker that breaks up earlier. The whole guitar rig is chosen with the intent of a desirable sound. You're not after a hi-fi reproduction of what comes from the amp. It's not pretty.
I choose different tubes for my guitar amp depending on the EQ and break up characteristics that I want. A change in tubes changes my sound. An EL-34 has a different sound than a 6CA7 or a 6550 or a 6L6. One step further, there's a variance between the manufacturers of the "same" tube. Many guitar players (some referred to as "cork sniffers") seek out NOS (New Old Stock) tubes for the specific sounds they are after.
Through the guitar, effects, amp and speaker cabinet combination, I seek a desirable tone. Each element a piece that impacts my sound in a way that is desirable to me. Once I have that, I depend on the PA system (solid state) for an accurate reproduction of that tone
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.
- Turn the amplifier on and let it warm up for a good 30 to 60 minutes (especially if you're using a tube amp).
- Turn amp off and plug in cable A. (The amp doesn't cool down much during the 30 seconds it takes to change cables.)
- Listen to cable A
- Turn amp off and plug in cable B.
- Listen to cable B
- Go back to cable A (which you always do, to confirm whether you heard a real difference).
- Repeat 10,000 times.
- ????
- Profit!
Blind testing works the same way, except that each cycle involves a random choice between cables A and B.You control for the "thermal characteristics of the AMPLIFIER" by designing the test carefully. No problem.
And, yes, you can hear the difference between cables in blind tests. And it is very easy to do... if the cables are sufficiently different. I went from plugging in my speakers with lamp cord (don't ask) to some whiz-bang audiophile speaker cable and I fell out of my chair.
I won't get into the "scientific basis" here... except to say that, if you were to watch an apple fall from a tree, you might well conclude that there's no "scientific basis" for quantum mechanics. After all, doesn't Newtonian mechanics explain apples perfectly?
- - - -
As for the idea of selling "special" cool-looking plastic parts and claiming they improve the sound... that business already exists, and it's called "Bose". :)
Actually, that's not fair. Audiophiles love making Bose jokes (bitter jealousy, you know) but I believe that Bose has a quality product. The product is composed of (a) a box that audiophiles laugh at, but which can produce better sound then any random boom box, and (b) amazingly great marketing, such that the customers truly believe that they are hearing great sound. And so, therefore, they are.
Audio is psychology, and reproducing audio is as much magic as it is science. I've heard it said that the customers who brought the first hand-cranked record players were amazed by the realistic quality of the sound, and were often unable to tell the difference between a live band and a Victrola in blind tests.