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Happy 100th To The Vacuum Tube
williamw83 writes "Today, November 16, 2004 has been declared as the centennial of the birth of modern electronics by the American Vacuum Society. As the AIP Physics News Update reports, this marks 'British scientist John Ambrose Fleming's 1904 invention of the first practical electronic device. Known as the thermionic diode, this first simple vacuum tube, containing only two electrodes, could be used to convert an alternating current (AC) to a direct current (DC).' Today's celebration takes place as part of the AVS's 51st Annual Symposium & Exhibition in Anaheim, CA. Being a guitar player myself, I've come to truly appreciate the technology of the vacuum tube every time I crank up my amplifier. This 100-year-old grandfather of electronics, used by musicians and audiophiles across the world, has proven that profound advances in technology do not always render old technologies obsolete."
Vacuum tubes, as big as they were, were a huge improvement of the mechanical relay-powered early computers.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Yes, amplifiers are definitely the most important uses of vacuum tubes. I can't think of a single more important use in all of history that I would put down on the article had I written it...
My Systems
It's a shame that more audio electronics don't use tubes. the warm sound simply can't be beat...
It'll be a shameless plug, but here are some pics of some REAL nice tubes in action...
http://www.firebottles.com/
Enjoy...
My
Vacuums suck!
-------
Bite Me Fanboy!!
In the December 2k2 PC World mag (page 88), they had a preview of AOPEN's AX4B-533 Tube board. Aparently, the sound card had an integrated vacuum tube for quality sound, and it's supposed to be great, but I never bought one myself. Has anybody else?
I hope the demand for guitar amplifier tubes keeps manufacturing going for a few more years.
I for one, welcome my EL34 and 12AX7 overlords that glow red hot inside my Marshall.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Couldn't wait another 2 hours, could you?
i once owned a Yaseu-101EE that had a couple of small amp tubes in it, they would glow a pleasant blue when transmitting...
What with the current crop of professional mixers so intent on recording at levels well above the maximum range of the media the music is written onto, it hardly seems necessary to invest in such outdated devices in an effort to recapture that unique sound of yesteryear.
...sounds like my old Vox AC30 with JJ/Tesla vacuum tubes. Thank you Slovakia or whichever former bloc country makes these things. And thank you too the enviroment, which lets yourself be destroyed by the hugely enviromentally unfriendly production practices in place to makes these things.
here
- I.V.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
I can defend this until the day I die. Only guitar players and a few others can appreciate the vacuum tube. Solid state guitar amps, even the more modern modeling amps from Line 6, don't hold a candle to tubes as far as tone is considered.
As a musician I resent being in the same sentence as an audiophile.
i find it interesting that vacuum tubes are considered _modern_ electronics. wouldn't the transistor be a better first milestone in modern electronics? what sort of electronics existed before 1904 anyway?? i would suggest that vacuum tubes marked the beginning of electronics in general.
I can't believe the tech is 100yrs old. I knew it was old but 100. For those that say tubes are dated clearly havn't listened to "good" stereo equipment. Might I suggest Audiogon.
Vacuum tubes in all forms are pretty much the base of our electronic world, from the tube inside your microwave oven, to the transmitter tubes in TV and radio stations, to the power tubes for radar, to the ceramic triode inside the Pioneer and Voyager probes (still working after 30 years, tubes: unreliable?), to the CRT you're probably staring at right now, to the electron microscopes and the vacuum deposition chambers that build your semiconductors, I'd say you need to open your mind a little bit.
Oh, and tube amps? Go to the closest audio shop you can find and go audition a Carver with some Totem Acoustics speakers...
Lets not forget the single largest use of vacuum tubes today, the CRT (cathod ray tube). There in your old TVs and moniters.
Also every radio station and high power transmission you listen to is transmitted by large vacuum tubes. Silicon may never be able to replace these 10KW+ monsters.
Oh, and I almost forgot, even if you're staring at an LCD on a laptop, the backlight? You guessed it: tubes!
Musician: Someone who makes music. (Excluding, by definition, singers who do not also play an instrument)
Audiophile: Someone who spends too much money to buy audio equipment that produces no appreciable auditory benefit over less expensive audio equipment but justifies his purchases by claiming that objective testing of such devices does not take into consideration unmeasurable properties such as "warmth". (sim. Linux zealot)
Maybe it's just me, but we typically celebrate birthdays when the person is alive, or in the case of a computer still usable.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear vacuum tube... happy b-day to you. Vacuum tubes were a great achievement back then. The top of the line. Then transistors came along.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Our only hope in case of an EMP (/nuclear). Vacuum tubes may be ugly and power hungry, but they are much more likely to withstand huge electromagnetic pulses (malicious or otherwise).
Posted by timothy on 11-15-04 21:59
from the vacuums-don't-suck dept.
williamw83 writes "Today, November 16, 2004 has been declared as the centennial of the birth of modern electronics by the American Vacuum Society.
Timmy couldn't have waited another 2 hours to post this?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
cool.
They glow. Seriously, that's why I think they are cool. Anything that warms up has a nice feel to it. Old radios sound very interesting as they come to life. After the click of the power switch, first nothing, then a low hum that is replaced by subtle noise as it drops, then finally the audio creeps into the foreground. Soon after comes the smell of dust burning..
I had a chance to build some vacuum tube projects in the late 80s. (We had lots of tubes and nothing else to do.) Made a power supply for the older speakers that featured electromagnets on the back to revive an old tube radio.
Tubes forever!
Blogging because I can...
Actually, I'm listening to my Dynaco ST70 tube amp.
These amps are the best way to get into the tube amp stuff. I'm building my first 300b amp with massive iron, and can not wait to blow the shit out of my friends shit Sony crap.
I wish more people were into tube amps.
She hated to hear someone say "that sucks" in class, so she would always remind us to replace it with her-choice euphamism: "that vacuums."
Yes but the digital ones go up to 11.
Solid State Amplifiers have not (And at least for the time being) will not be able to ever reproduce the warm tone emitting from a 60's black face fender w/ geniuine old tubes.
Look at the drum kit, for instance. Remember the 80/90's when people actually believed reinventing the drum in electronic form would outperform the real deal? Sure, you can do a whole lot of modulation on electronic drums, but nothing will be able to replace a simple snare drum or set of toms.
The old, at least in the world of music, is most definatley here to stay.
As a guitarist who is a tube nut (currently own a Mesa Mark IV and a Rivera TBR-1SL), I'm a bit disappointed to see that nobody has improved the vacuum tube at all since it was abandoned in the mainstream for the solid state transistor. It's a well known fact that guitar amplifiers produce more pleasing sounds when the tubes run hot, but amps which are known for running the tubes hot (such as the Vox AC30) are also known for blowing tubes. Why haven't we made tempered glass (Pyrex?) tubes built to run at higher temperaturesr. Why haven't we applied newer technologies to produce better tubes? It also seems odd to me that tubes made today don't seem to last any longer than tubes made 50 years ago.
Why did they make relay-based computers? Vacuum tubes had been around for a while by then.
Actually solid-state does render vacuum tubes obsolete, to the rational mind. Once you've admitted that the sound you really like just involves lots of second order distortion it's no big deal to make a processor using opamps or discrete transistors to add that distortion to a reliable, efficient, cheap amplifier. As many manufacturers have done! Boss, Line 6, and Roland to name just 3.
You're also forgetting that the biggest contribution to the sound comes from the cabinet, speaker and transformer. Like I say, the valve just adds some nice distortion.
You're not one of these people who believes in gold-plated connectors and $2500 power cables too are you?
The Toronto Star did a front page write up in their @Biz section.
My professor told me how once he had a radiograph machine that wasn't working, and when he asked for an explanation, the repair technician pointed to the tube and patiently explained to him that "All the vacuum leaked out."
Ultravox RULES OK?
that is true. my friend had a Marshall JMP-1 digital pre-amp that went to 11... but it still had 12AX-7 tubes in it.
In the grand scheme of things 100 years doesn't even count, a few billion years would be old.
The strange thing is they don't want you to realise that there every was anything 100 years ago, or infact anything before Hitler based on my sisters school.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
All great inventions and have very specific purposes but the only thing in common between the items in your list is the "vaccuum" part. All much different from the electron vaccuum tube.
First of all, for the few of you wondering why tubes make a difference in audio quality, it is all about harmonics. That's right, harmonics. Tubes add the 'warmth' to sound through harmonics, but they also distort harmonically. Personally, I have a Behringer Ultra-Q T1951 and love to run my cd out and even my Airport Express out through it. The tubes really do give a more realistic sound to digital media. Sure, the introduce some hiss, but they add a lot to the music. There is a great paper done by Russell Hamm that explains tubes vs transistors, you can find it here .
Yes, I love tubes. I love the wacko physics and great ideas people had in the past. Lessee here:
Miniaturized tubes (In german, but pretty pictures)
Mercury arc rectifer Evil-looking power tube! AH!!! An insane alien octopus!
A glass analog to digital converter? You betcha!!!
Tubes? Big? Don't think so!
I confess, I don't just like tubes, I like snap and tunnel diodes as well.
"warm" sound - let me guess, for the times when you MUST listen to a CD, you put green marker on the outside to reduce jitter? Are you a gentoo user too? This just just more Rice
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Uh, you're manipulating electrons in a vacuum. They are ALL electron tubes. One exception is the hydrogen thyratron, which is a proton tube. 20000A switched in 20nsec.
Or ion bombardment chambers, sure, you're manipulating ions this time, but it's all about the fields in a vacuum, baby!
The fun part is all the different ways to manipulate the electrons, collect them, generate them, etc.
The TVs my family had when I was a kid used tubes. So did my father's clunk old mono "HiFi" pre-amp/amp. They glowed and smelled neat and took forever to warm up.
When a tube went bad, we had to go to . . . the drug store.
There was a white-painted masonite kiosk there. It had a board on top where you could plug in a tube. There were a few different sockets. I forget how they indicated success or failure.
The kiosk had a locked cabinet where the spares were kept. I can't imagine there were more than a couple of dozen types there, and I suspect it was a lot less than that.
Stefan
We've probably dreamed staring into the glow of filaments as much as musicians.
The best application for vacuum tubes that i've heard of is for the flight control systems in cold war era Russian Mig Fighter jets. Apparently Vaccum tubes are much more resistant to the EMP blast created from a nuclear detonation. Which means in the early stages of WWIII the Russians would still have jets in the air while American fighters would quickly realize that all the millions of dollars worth of high tech computer gadgetry that allows their planes to fly does not operate once a few chips go poof.
Here's a link which mention this.
Apparently the model used in the Mig 21 radar system (the SC33C triode) has garnered quite a following in high end audiphile class A tube amplifiers...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Where does the "American Vacuum Society" meet? I always wanted to meet Anna Nicole Smith.
Yes indeed, Tubes Rock!
While I personally don't think tube-distorted sound is "better", ("different" is a better word - if that's what you want, fine, if someone else, such as the Rest Of The World, doesn't care for it, Deal With It :), I am quite interested in building my own tubes in order to build some electrical devices from raw materials. Caps, batteries, etc are easy. Transistors are harder than tubes, so... anyone know of any good books on making your own tubes?
Yes vacuum tubes were invented 100 years ago, but it wasn't until much later that Howard Armstrong perfected them such that they could be used as amplifiers. I think he was certainly an un-sung hero. He perfected the vacuum tube, then he invented the super hederodyne circuit used in modern AM radios. Later he go so upset at the static and poor quality of AM that he turned around and invented FM. A great story with a tragic ending -- he ended up killing himself by jumping out of a tall building. This is of course after years of patent battles with RCA (the microsoft of their day.)
I've got some tube type shortwave receivers including a Hammarlund HQ-129X ca. 1946, a Hallicrafters S-38 ca. 1946, a Collins 75A-2 ca. 1952 and a transmitter, a Heathkit DX-40, all in good working condition. Radios like this are often referred to as "Boat Anchors"
There are quite a number of Ham radio transmitting power amplifiers from various manufacturers on the market that use tubes, too.
73 - K9LJB
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain "Boat Anchors"
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'm thinking a CRT _is_ a sort of an amplifier
Wonder if old computers will be held in the same regard years from now....
Blogging because I can...
w00t!
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
More money is made in selling replacement tubes :) Seriously, most tube people are to drop the cash on it. Those that aren't switch to transistor. It used to be you couldn't get that nice warm sound with transistors, they just don't distort the sound in teh same way as tubes. Well, DSPs have changed all that. You can get quite a large amount of signal processing for quite a small amount of silicon. The tube modeling amps are really quite good these days.
As an example of one that just rocks (albeit impractical for stage), check out Native Instrument's Guitar Rig. It's software for the PC. Unprocessed (as in no amp, mic or anything) electric guitar goes in, great sound comes out. Clean, distorted, whatever you want. Build a virtual rack of amps, EQs, speakers, mics, etc and it models them to a high degree of accuracy. It's quite impressive.
So for most people concerned about money, something that models a tube amp is good enough. The purists, well they'll spend the money on the tubes.
Also, though I'm not 100% certian, I think that part of what gives that nice warm fuzz is running a tube up past it's limit. Unlike transistors, which are basically linear to a point then just stop pasisng more power, tubes are fairly linear then start curving off more and more, and increasing in distortion. So to get that real warm sound, you run them past their linear phase.
So if you built a tube with better characteristics, stands to reason you'd just have to drive it that much harder to get what you want. As I said, not sure on this, but I'm guessing it's part of the reason.
Er, I think the point was that consumer tube amps are a waste of time and money. I don't think the point was lightbulbs, CRTs, Microwave, or test tubes.
Only guitar players and a few others can appreciate the vacuum tube.
And a very very few at that.
In my book, the amp is just as important as the guitar. Crappy amp? Crappy sound, regardless of the guitar.
All the quality pros in the studio and on stage use tube amps without exception. Using a transistor amp is fine for kids or for practice - but they really aren't acceptable for anyone serious.
As a musician myself, I have to agree that tube amps have their own unique "tone" and haven't ever been perfectly reproduced yet by solid state gear.
Still, I also feel it's only a matter of time. One of the biggest problems is that so far, most solid state gear (like the drum machines of the 80's and 90's) simply plays back digital samples of the real instruments. This will *never* be sufficient, because at best, you only have a perfect reproduction of one particular "hit" of a given drum or cymbal. Played over and over, this will sound too artificial. Real drummers are *human*. They don't hit the drum in the exact same place with the exact same intensity every time with the stick. Their timing is ever-so-slightly off, too, unlike a machine. Not only that, but as a drummer plays, the environment changes slightly. He/she may scoot a little bit closer or further from the drum kit, or the bolts and clamps holding everything together may be a little bit looser as a session progresses. The drum heads themselves are in various states of wear at different times too. All of these little nuances result in sample playback sounding "not quite right" to people after listening to it enough.
Where there's promise is the computer simulations of instruments. Take a virtual instrument like Steinberg's "The Grand" (grand piano soft-synth). Instead of just playing back a bunch of samples, it's synthesizing the sound, even accounting for such things as the reverberation of adjacent strings to the one vibrating from playing a given note, and the ability to reproduce the dull "thuds" of the hammers in the piano, usually only heard by the person playing the instrument.
Simulations of guitar amps are improving all the time, too. The Line 6 stuff is amazing compared to anything that came before. (I used to think my ART SGX-2000 was "incredible" - but it pales compared to even the original Pod.) As CPU power gets cheaper and people learn more about what makes a "tube sound" unique, we'll reach a point where you can't tell the tube amp from the effects processor simulating one.
I'm surprised no one realizes nearly ever radio or TV transmitter outputting 1,000's of watts or more uses tubes, albeit ceramic tubes rather than glass ones in most cases. And this is today in late 2004. Although in the most technical sense they are "amplifiers", they aren't audio amps. The transmitter tubes often have metal fins to radiate heat and a "chimney" to air cool the tube. This technology could be adapted to "hot" guitar amps, although they would be pricey.
Errr... NO! Steinberg's The Grand is still a ROMPler instrument and plays back wave files, but adds stuff to them like effects.
Right now computer modellig in real-time is still way, way off into the future and what's out there sounds nothing like real acoustic instruments.
... and not just for "the warm sound." They're used because they can be built arbitrarily large much easier than you can build power MOSFETs. You can build them to produce hundreds of megawatts of RF energy with a single klystron; a linear amplifier tube can easily be built to handle megawatts.
I haven't heard of any 1.22 GW vacuum tubes, but they certainly could be built. They'd be large.
I took exception to the "the vacuum tube is pretty much obsolete" part of the OP... If his definition of obsolete is "used in 99% of modern applications", okay, I'll let that 1% slide just for him.
Ah, yes, the Prestigous Vacuum Society whose prestige is only surpassed the Right Honurable Horse and Buggy Society!
It's called hardened electronics. I don't know how it's done, but it can be and the military does. Don't they they didn't think of this :)
Besdies, that's all academic. Both the US and Russia have enough nuclear arsenal to just take out everyone. That's one of the reasons a nuclear conflict never happened, neither side could figure out how to win it. All scenarios ended up in both sides (and everyone else) getting annihlated. There is just too much firepower.
As a musician myself, I have to agree that tube amps have their own unique "tone" and haven't ever been perfectly reproduced yet by solid state gear.
Tubes are natively voltage amplifiers, bipolar (NPN and PNP) transistors are natively current amplifiers. Sure you can make circuitry to create either a voltage amplifier or a current amplifier as a system around either device, but that still doesn't change the native way in which each device performs internally. When overloaded, a tube naturally produces mostly even-order harmonics. A bipolar transistor will naturally produce both even and odd-order harmonics, but mostly odd-order... which sound very harsh.
Tube amps natively have *very* high slewing rates too, much higher than most transistor amps, except for some very recent, exotic transistor amp designs which use some very special transistors, which are finally beginning to approach the slewing rates that simple tube amps have achieved forever. This is probably the single reason why tube amps sound so much more "crisp and clear" than transistor amps have historically been able to achieve.
Really!
http://www.lindsaybks.com/bks7/finstr/
the URL links to one of several places that you can get the book Instruments of Amplification by Pete Freidrichs. The book describes how to build your own tubes, transistors and other more obscure amplifying technologies. Oldskool Geek at its best!
(Or Google for "instruments of amplification")
Note: Lindsay Publications is worth a lookaround... LOTS of obsolete-but-interesting, obscure, or otherwise hard to find tech books, generally CHEAP!
DIsclosure: I have no connection whatever with Friedrichs or Lindsay Publications!
The Fleming diode might have been the first electron tube (valve) but it was Lee De Forest who put in a control grid between the filament cathode and the anode plate and created a device that could amplify voltage, which made the whole world of useful electronics circuitry all possible. The 100th anniversity of De Forest's "Audion" triode is not until 2007.
Technically, it was first invented by Lord (enter name here) 4 years prior. So this article is wrong.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
You are a bigger waste of space than I originally thought
I heard from someone a long time ago that a team had done some work into seeing what might have happened if the transistor hadn't been invented when it was. They wanted to get an idea of how far you could take vacuum technology in today's environment. I know of no more details than this.
If anyone can fill in the details please do because my searching on google hasn't turned up anything like it. (I'm at a loss what to search for apart from the question in the subject line)
Believe with me, my saplings.
In all seriousness, the tube market today is relying on the sale of tubes that for the most part were made 50 years ago, or with tubes imported from the former Soviet Union or China. The Soviet/Chinese tubes have become a mainstay for hams running 1KW class linear amplifiers, and there is a steady market for types such as 4CX500, 3-500Z, and so on.
Sadly, for many antique radio restorers, the prices and lack of availability of certain tube types keep many promising projects on the shelves, and many of the radios that used those tubes are usually found stripped of them. A late '20s or early '30s console will almost always have the type 45 tubes stripped out.
At the same time, just about anyone who has acquired box lots of tubes will tell you that 90 percent of the tubes will never get used. A lot of these tubes were manufactured as replacements in 1960s era TV sets, and in a way were the first "integrated circuits", but have little use outside these roles. They were made by the tens of millions, but were made obsolete by the quick adoption of solid state circuitry in the 1970s. Few people collect or maintain 1960s era TV sets, but the old tubes stay around just as the 1mb memory sticks collect in many modern day geeks junk boxes. Other tubes, such as the combinations used in many '40s and '50s radios are available in adequate supply, either with tube vendors at hamfests or online for the forseeable future, or could be pirated from undesirable radios.
It is just too expensive to do small scale tube production to satisfy the needs of a few thousand antique radio collectors and amplifier restorers. Inquiries were actually made to one of the Russian manufacturers to start producing new Type 45 or similar tubes. A run of a few thousand would satisfy the needs of collectors for years, but the unit costs are as high or higher than buying New Old Stock where it can be found.
I have been somewhat inactive at the restoration game for a few years, but I remember when a major antique radio club looked into having one of the Russian or Eastern European manufacturers build some new highly sought after types, the combination of minimum quantities and unit cost would have risked tens of thousands of dollars, for a product that has a very limited market. Perhaps the ability to sell to a worldwide market easily, ala eBay might make it feasible today, but it would still be a risky proposition.
There are other tube types that would be welcome if they could be produced economically with a limited run, such as 7360, 1L6, and probably a couple of dozen other types. Perhaps a modern cottage industry could pick up the slack.
Modern electronics have millions, if not billions, of active components to get the job done. Not that long ago, some of these jobs were done with two or three dozen active components. Pretty amazing, if you asked me.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Please don't link to freedictionary or any of those types of sites. They all scrape their material from the original source, wikipedia, then put a ton of ads on the page. Please, never link to freedictionary.
DSPs are "okay." As in, a non-musician will probably not notice it. But it's still not *quite* there. In a studio situation I think it's possible to get away with them, but I've never heard a simulation-driven amp that really sounded good live.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Despite the recent improvements in LCD technology, it is easy to forget that most of you are reading this off a vaccum tube CRT. Your household microwave contains a cavity magnetron tube. The niches for tube technology are diminishing but far from dead yet.
I have even heard of tiny tubes being etched out of silicon using the same photolithography techniques used to create other forms of nanotechnology. This is not as silly as it sounds, they could survive heat and radiation that would cook a transistor, and would be ideal in environments no solid state component could survive. (In a jet engine combustion chamber, a venus lander or on a space probe operating well inside Jupiter's radiation belts, or close to the sun)
My rights don't need management.
I've played around with vacuum's before, but it just doesn't get the job done. It's either too loose or too tight. Here's a free tip: never try this with an industrial strength vacuum :)
I didn't think George W. Bush was that old. Huh, waddya know...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Thermionic Valves, or Valves for short, for our British cousins across the pond.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Anybody know if Macintosh still makes stereo component sytems? A quick Google search only found computers.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
The Soviets. Due to them being frozen out of solid state science for a long time, they were forced to continue the path of tube advancement. The best tubes nowadays come from the Soviets.
I sell the gold plated connectors and $2500 speaker (and power) cables!
www.blinkhighend.com
Tibbon
tibbon.com
This goes out to all of those that say there isn't a difference in tube amplification, and modelings of just extra 'distortion'. I offer two examples of such failures.
As proof of this, I offer the Vox AC30HW, which I have had plenty of experience playing. Now the same company, has created a Vox Valvetronix amp or whatever crap they call it. I'd only assume that the company the manufactures the AC30 would be able to emulate it the best, however they do a terrible job. Hook up an A/B amp switch, and try to achieve similar sounds. Now push the Solid state POS to higher levels, how does it react. Try different playing dynamics, etc... Now try the same with the Vox. The vox only gets better, and the emulation, doesn't act at all like the real deal, nor sound ANYWHERE as good in depth, tone, or musical dynamics. In other words, it sounds like shit.
Take a Cybertwin amp by Fender, and put that against a real 64 or 65 Fender Twin with great tubes in it, that has been maintained well. Not even in the same ballpark.
So if the manufactures themselves can't even get it right, who can? I'm sure at some point it can be done, but just the A/D and D/A conversion and poor clocking on these digital amps kills it from the start.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Are the Russians still selling `em?
I have a GlowBug 40 (new) and an HW-16 (old). Both are fun. Vacuum tubes are still quite important for high power applications.
I gotta wonder---do I sound like this when I'm geeking out about discovering a whole nifty set of panorama-stitching tools, going on about Laplacian pyramids, control points, barrel distortion and such?
No wonder the non-dorks I talk to get such a glazed look in their eyes when I tell them what I'm currently interested in.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I have three words: Double Blind Test. When you can show me one of those, I'll believe you.
Ah, relays!
...
Pole slugs, heel-end slugs, multiple windings, opposed windings, balanced windings, serial / parallel resitance, serial / parallel capacitance, diode clamping,
All things done to the humble relay to modify operate / release characteristics and timing for use in logic circuits.
Who said 20 years in Telecomms was a waste of a life? Well, I did - just last week, in fact! But it did lead to an appreciation of some of the weird & wonderful design & engineering tricks pulled just to Make Stuff Work...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Depends on the processing. I dunno about hardware, I've not messed with it much. In software, it's just damn impressive. Guitar Rig is great but other signal processing, like Impulse based reverb, and fool me in to thinking it's real. General purpose CPUs are just powerful enough to calculate things to amazing levels of precision, which gives amazing realism.
The real problem with DSPs up to this point has mainly been the use of too small a precision. They were often 16 or 32-bit integer. Well 16-bit isn't near enough and even 32-bit isn't, when it's integer math. It seems kind of counter intuitive given that it's way more detail than we can hear (or electonics reproduce) but it's because signal processing is an iterative process, each step based on the last. Thus rounding errors build up and become siginificant.
It's the same reason GPUs went to 128-bit floating point for their shaders. Even though 24-bit (or at the very most 30-bit) colour is more than we can percieve, the errors in 32-bit integer calculation in shaders build up quickly. 128-bit is the level needed to ensure no error (the cards also have a 64-bit FP mode that looks pretty good).
Audio is the same way. 32-bit FP is needed to do proper processing. For some things, greater precision is needed and 64-bit FP is pretty much the "always good enough" limit where you just don't have to worry.
Also the speed of processors has been increasing dramaticly. I started with digital audio in 1996 and then nothing could be done in realtime in software, it would take hours to apply an ok reverb to a 5 minute file. Now I can do prefectly realistic reverb in realtime, with only a fraction of my CPU and it's not even particularly fast by today's standards.
I'm not saying it's necessiarly all there for amp simulation, at least in hardware (Guitar Rack is damn close) but it's at least 95% there. For most people, that's good enough, given the cost difference. Tube amps are expensive, and pickey. Much cheaper to get a transistor amp with some modeling.
A bloody big vacuum tube, or "valve" as we say in English. It's a funny shaped one, with loads of anodes and cathodes in the same envelope, and it has more in common with cold-cathode tubes than the EL34s in your Marshall, but nevertheless...
In the USA these things are called 'Tubes'. In the UK we call them 'Valves'. Why?
:)
Well, they look like tubes, but they function as valves. And of course the people of the USA are more concerned with looks than functionality...
Baz
or as John Lennon put it:
"Well, I wish I could just do like B.B. King. If you would put me with B.B. King, I would feel real silly. I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it."
tubes...gave us...oscillators. ...computer circuitry relies upon oscillators for clocking
You've led such a sheltered life.
Never seen an astable multivibrator made with relays and no active devices?
gewg_
See Spectrum's article on the 50th anniversary of the transistor.
Here (at a Raytheon facility), we've got a display in the hallway with about a dozen vacuum tubes. Some dating back to 1922 (and patented...doh, there's that bad word)...the tube was originally named "Raytheon", then the company named after it.
Seems we had a bit to do with the microwave also.
Just another day in Paradise
Too lazy to create a sig...
Boat anchors rock! I too have a Hallicrafters S-38, along with a few others. Hallicrafters, especially the S-38, had style and performance. A few pics here:
http://retro-tronics.com/radio.php
If you have never used a restored and tuned up AM/SW radio like these, you don't know how good AM can be. Of course the content isn't what it used to be.
Want to build something with tubes? Go here: http://www.funwithtubes.com/
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the important date comes up in about two years marking the 100th birthday of the TRIODE tube invented by Lee DeForest. The diode could only rectify AC current to DC, the triode could amplify weak signals, and switch current. It would later give rise to radio, television and computers. The "Audion" as Mr. Deforest named his invention, inserted a control element between the cathode and plate of the diode. This stroke of genius finally put Edison's discovery of thermionic emission to practical use.
The first CRT was invented by Ferdinand Braun, in 1897. http://www.oneillselectronicmuseum.com/page8.shtml
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How can I say such a thing, esp since I own one and am a musician?
Simple. The ONLY difference between solid state and tube amps is how peaks are handled. A tube warms and cools, so its response is slower - a con. The "pro" is that it doesn't clip out at the top of a peak.
Simple solution: get an amp with a higher max output. A solid state amp with twice the max output will cost less than a tube amp, and then you don't have to worry about it. Turn it up 50% higher than the tube could have gone, and you still have room left to never hit your peaks...ie, never worry about the clipping. Therefore, the benefit of the tube never materializes...and you're 50% louder to boot.
No, people who like tubes are just infatuated with old stuff. No more complex than that.
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Hard borosilicate glasses were commonly used on transmitting and other high powered tubes prior to the advent of ceramic/metal envelopes.
If you want some for a guitar amp, look for the type 6384. This is an ultra-rugged tube originally used for servoamplifiers on ICBMs! With a bit of rewiring, it makes a decent substitute for the 6L6. It has a pyrex bulb, ceramic spacers, and high temperature base.
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In 1922, Leo Deforest invented the audion tube, which allowed sound amplification.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The silvery spot inside most tubes was barium, not mercury. It reacts with oxygen to form barium oxide, the white powder inside a tube that has "gone to air".
Mercury was used in some tubes, but not the ones you would find in a TV or radio set. Mostly big rectifiers, thyratrons and ignitrons used in transmitters and industrial gear.
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continue to suck....
For audio that is... I still listen to superior vinyl records on a VTL all tube system. I hate digital but I love the iPod. At least an iPod played through tubes sounds better than through solid-state...
I should clarify my first claim that I'm speaking about the linearity of a single device (loaded by a current source) rather than a whole amplifier. Obviously, amplifiers with arbitrarily low distortion can be built using either technology.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Generally stuff at the time was designed by the Soviets to be field repairable. The equivalent US stuff was modular, but the modules themselves were only factory repairable. Note this wasn't just an issue of technology, it was philosophy learned during the "Great Patriotic War".
For over 50 years the majority of electronic devices were based on vacuum tubes. (Radio, radar, audio amplifiers, tape recorders, etc.) They reigned for just as long as transistors have today, and set the foundations for many of the major businesses that drive the 21st century: media (movies, radio, TV), computers, etc. Even today, your microwave oven contains a tube, and in all probability, so does your TV set.
100 years and men STILL think they will enhance penis size! You'd think we'd learn...oh wait....wrong tube. Ahemm
Who knows where the combination could lead?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
/Almost had a job with them coming out of university many years ago.
vacuum tubes!
The processes of crystal growth and zone refining of silicon and germanium require induction heating, which is one of the areas where vacuum tubes are still widely used.
Ion implantation equipment used for semiconductor fabrication still uses vacuum tubes, as well.
Not to mention the CRTs in oscilloscopes, and all the other tubes in the test equipment that helped develop and test early semiconductors.
If tubes had never come on the scene, the technologies needed to produce semiconductors never could have been developed...
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"It's Megamaid! She's gone from suck to blow!"
has proven that profound advances in technology do not always render old technologies obsolete.
yeah, it's not obsolete, just expensive, and not as easy to come by...
http://www.worldwar1.com
Please submit your brilliant and insightful article to Wikipedia.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
who developed the audion in 1906. I guess his brother "Leo" was a few years late by 1922?
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My Dad owned a tube tester of his own. Hell he had his own stash of tubes. It was fun to just experiment.
...Happy Birthday, dear vacuum tube, happy birthday to you...
...and many more, on Channel 4...
...non-crystalline or "amprphous" silicon...
that's "amorphous" silicon!
There were 48,000 telephones in the U.S. by 1880. Long-distance service between New York and Chicago began in 1892. You can use electro-mechanical devices as amplifiers: imagine placing an earphone next to a microphone.
Motor driven spark-gap transmitters and diode "cystal set" receivers were in common use long after the invention of the vacuum tube. Marconi's transmitters were immense, resembling nothing so much as a power station. The regenerative receiver was a critical advance, but tubes were short-lived and expensive.
Morse (CW) has the advantage of being easy to read in a weak signal or a noisy environment and the hardware requirements and costs are minimal. Morse code isn't bound to radio or the telegraph. You can use it with flags, a horn, a whistle, a flashlight, a mirror, almost anything, really.
In the enviroments where CW and Morse endured the longest, this was generally considered a plus.
Well, technically, ok - I guess it is still a "ROMPler" instrument... It has a giant data file that goes with it, that contains the raw sample data it uses.
But from reading Steinberg's instruction manual, it sounds to me like it goes far beyond simply playing back individual samples....
I get the impression that if anything, it's a "hybrid" of sorts. It has raw sound data it works with, but does a lot to process and alter that data for realistic results, instead of just playing it back exactly as recorded (with standard things like reverb or chorus effects optionally added).
Quick google check would have helped me out, eh?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."