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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.
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
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.
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...
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.
This I agree with. People obsessed with the fidelity don't even listen to the music. They always say, "I just want to hear the music like it's supposed be heard!" But total fidelity make the music disappear. Like a collector. What he collects disappears into the collection, which all follows a model inside his head.
Apparently the problem was that the input to the tube stage was the crappy generic AC97 sound chip that's integrated into every cheap motherboard. Even with the smoothing of the tubes, the sound just wasn't as good as it could have been.
It was therefore relegated to novelty status.
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.
Oh, get real! You "virtuoso" lovers who think the particular form of proficiency held by guys like Vai and Petrucci and Shawn Lane and whoever else is the only valid form are unreal. There's more than one way to play the instrument as everyone from Keith Rowe to Jimi Hendrix to Yngwie Malmsteen to Keiji Haino has showed us. Is Steve Vai amazing? Absolutely. Is Thurston Moore amazing? Just as. Are they amazing at different things? Yes. Keiji Haino could never play a Steve Vai song. And Vai could never play a Haino song. So who's better? Neither. They do different things even if they both play the electric guitar.
Heh. Agreed. Tubes are excellent at producing sound, but not necessarily great at reproducing it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Uh, since you're going to be using speakers that are 5% efficient, in a room full of resonances, arguing over the last 0.0001% of THD in the amp is pointless.
I've found that speaker quality and room treatment to be far more important than the amp selection, once above a certain level of quality.
I would disagree with that. Not that I'm a Cobain fan, but there's no reason that you should have to be a master of the Stratocaster in order to have a good-sounding amplifier. 0.001% is way too low a number. Maybe half or more of the people who own electrics are so hopeless that the amp doesn't matter, but not 9,999 out of 10,000.
Having worked as an amp tech at a guitar shop for 6+ years, I can tell you that I saw a lot of poor and mediocre players with nice amps... but I almost NEVER saw a good player with a crap amp or a crap guitar.
It's like saying that poor drivers shouldn't have good tires.
OTOH, I had a customer with a small-box Marshall 50W head that was ASTONISHING. You put it on about 3, and it was as if you were... I don't know, man, it was just beautiful. Tone, responsivity, everything. and then you pumped it up to about 7... Smoothest and creamiest, most perfect overdrive I've ever heard to this day. It was that 0.001% amplifier that cried out for a 0.001% player. When I played it for the guy who owned it (after I put new tubes in and biased it), I played it as God intended - and he was flabbergasted! He'd never actually let the amp do the dirty work, he was using some crappy ADA tube preamp! That Marshall was like Anna Kournikova in a nunnery - a complete waste of natural perfection.
Obviously I've got a bit of bias (HA! Bias! Get it? HA!) on the subject, but having two degrees in EE , 6+ years of guitar shop experience, and about a dozen albums recorded as musician or producer/engineer or both gives me what I consider to be a pretty good background in the science and art of guitar amplifier sound. However, it's all subjective. A good sound is the sound you like.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Clearly, you don't play guitar, or you would know that the raw, warm sound of a guitar crying through a tube amp close to meltdown is as sweet a sound as a woman close to orgasm.
;)
But please, PLEASE, do tell us about those other undoubtedly equally interesting applications you had in mind.
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.
Some may think so, but I disagree completely. I don't want an my audio electronics to sound warm. In fact I don't want it to sound of *anything*; I only want to hear what it is supposed to be reproducing. If it adds any sound of its own then it's not doing its job properly. If the music it is playing needs anything added then the musicians weren't doing their jobs properly.
... 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.
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.
Continue that "monitor" thought to include the television and you might have one of the most widespread uses vacuum tubes.
Back on the thought of tubes in amplifiers, its funny to me that the reason that tubes are better is specifically because they are less accurate than the transitors. The "crunch" and "warmth" are due to distinct flaws in the signal reproduction that just happen to sound good.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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
The great thing about taking so long to warm up is impatient folks having garage sales or donating stuff to charity; they often mistake a functioning device (radio, amp., etc.) as faulty because it doesn't make sound immediately. I get the stuff cheap, they get rid of their 'crap'. A good deal for both of us.
The light at the end of the tunnel is a train.
WHERE did you get that? Let's see... First satelite in orbit? Check. First dog in space? Check. First man in space? Check. First woman in space? Check. Shot down a U2 spyplane at 70,000 feet? Check. Lots of supersonic ultra-maneuvreable aircraft? Check.
Food for thought:
There is an interesting article by Robert Heinlein about his visit to the Soviet Union, which included the spy plane incident.
Heinlein was very skeptical about the Russian claims of shooting down the U-2 with a missile, noting that the Russians had recovered the plane intact.
That is probably an unfounded conspiracy theory, since we later learned that the Russians shot off a whole bunch of missiles, including one that shot down and killed one of their own pilots. According to the pilot's testimony, it appears that the U2 wasn't directly hit, but had an explosion near enough to it to damage it. [If you want to kill several hours, this is rather fascinating reading via the web and google's usenet archives -- both for the event itself, and the guesses/conspiracies what happened.]
Heinlein's account of Russia is also worth looking up, especially for the tinfoil hat crowd. He was under the impression that the USSR was purposely overstating the population of Moscow. He also considered the possibility that Russia had covered up the loss of a human pilot in a rocket accident. Look for "Worlds of Robert A Heinlien", c. 1980-ish or so, it includes the (non-fiction) article as well as other works by him, both fiction and non-fiction.
As for Russian technology, they whupped the US in several areas, including some aspects of the space program in addition to the ones you mentioned, as well as medical (e.i. laser-eye surgery), biological (biological weapons of terrifying effects, others), and military (certain planes, guns, etc, especially from a "ruggedness" perspective).
In the end, they seemed to have lost the cold war due to the US's economic might. Capital is a resource, and the US's less-managed economy[1] was better at generating capital then the USSR's more managed economy. I am of the opinion that the US also won because of its own openness. The security restrictions of the USSR was their own downfall[2]. The USSR's internal propaganda was worse then the US's, which was probably also a factor. Note which areas the USSR exceeded the US in -- those areas which was relatively cheap, yet had resources devoted to it (biological weapons, warfare), or those hard science that did not threaten communist dogma.
[1] And yes, the US's economy has been managed for many, many years now, through the gov't expansion/contraction of the money supply.
[2] Something I wish the Powers That Be would realize about the "War on Terror".
Back on the thought of tubes in amplifiers, its funny to me that the reason that tubes are better is specifically because they are less accurate than the transitors. The "crunch" and "warmth" are due to distinct flaws in the signal reproduction that just happen to sound good.
That's only half the story; yes, vacuum tubes (triodes in particular, like the 12AX7/12AT7 input stages of instrument amps) generate a lot of second-order (octave) harmonics, which make the music "sound better", even though total harmonic distortion ends up somewhere around 5-7%.
The other major reasons they are used are because they fail nicely (as opposed to a transistor, which smokes, heats and often explodes), and when overdriven, they clip the signal nicely. Transistors sound god-awful when overdriven.
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