Your analogy fails for technical reasons. A vacuum triode's voltage gain nonlinearity is a 3/2 power law, whereas a transistor's is exponential. These result in different distortion profiles in a circuit, and the two are suited for different power levels, voltage handling, and load impedances. Vacuum tubes go to hundreds of thousands of volts, and up to two megawatts of power per tube (Eimac has some examples of the latter on their website). In regards to consumer applications, a vacuum tube is bigger and need heater power, but one triode is a more linear voltage gain device than one transistor, so if you take a given solid state amplifier and build a vacuum tube one where you're allowed to use as many tubes as there are transistors in the SS one, you can build a more linear amplifier with the tubes.
I thought relying mostly on gluconeogenesis is unhealthy. That's why the FDA says at least 60% of daily caloric intake should be in the form of carbohydrates.
As usual, you omitted the most interesting part. What happened with the lawyer and wives, and were the men compensated--was justice served? These are such obvious questions that I fail to see the reason you did not anticipate them, other than to tease and frustrate us--I see already one other poster got curious.
It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok.
I see things very differently: political correctness making a problem where there is none. Male and female brains are quite different. While each individual case should be judged equally, it is obviously plausible that differences in enrollment are due to biological differences. It seems to me there are significant leftist vestiges believing that nurture overrides nature, and thus environment and raising are the main factors, whereas evolutionary psychologists like Pinker are consistently demonstrating the opposite with their research.
I think bringing in the analogy of the issue of racial differences is in order here. It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok. I've no doubt that if Edward's statistical technique were applied to male-female cognitive anthropometrics, the separation will become clear.
What's funny is, even as I'm about to start a CS job in May, I'm already thinking of starting a business, and indeed working on a product. But the funny part is that the business has nothing to do with CS...
At the same time, an acquaintance that did electrical engineering, and one that did biochemistry, each started a software companies. Makes me wonder about the worth of specialized degrees.
I see things very differently: political correctness making a problem where there is none. Male and female brains are quite different. While each individual case should be judged equally, it is obviously plausible that differences in enrollment are due to biological differences. It seems to me there are significant leftist vestiges believing that nurture overrides nature, and thus environment and raising are the main factors, whereas evolutionary psychologists like Pinker are consistently demonstrating the opposite with their research.
I think bringing in the analogy of the issue of racial differences is in order here. It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok. I've no doubt that if Edward's statistical technique were applied to male-female cognitive anthropometrics, the separation will become clear.
I don't have a problem with transistor amps. I've built clones of the Pass Labs XA MOSFET amps to drive my low end (my high end is 1800 Watt DC glow discharge plasma derived from Hill's design, minus the helium). And as good as your Sunfires may be, there are far better transistor amps--Halcro's top end amps have the lowest distortion of any commercial amplifier.
Tubes can provide far more power than a transistor, it's just that most audio designers are a bit scared of the power tubes, with their high voltage and need for active cooling (blower, but there are other solutions, and making it quiet is not difficult in my experience). An Eimac 8974 does 2 MEGAWATTS! Transistors are limited to a few kilowatts. Large tubes are still common in radio transmitters, military, scientific (accelerators), and power grid applications. And, they work just fine for audio. Small transmitter tubes such as the 4x250A, which are 250 Watt beam power tetrodes, are used in a few DIY and commercial audio amlpifiers.
Thus, your statement that the transistor amp wins has no technical backing in the power area as well. It simply has to do with economics--quality output transformers for tube amps are expensive, and speakers are designed low impedance with solid state drive in mind (though there is an alternative, a switchmode output transformer which is cheap and has no distortion in the audio band since it operates at ~400 kHz, but is unfortunately patented and thus there's only one company using the design, David Berning Company). A single tube (triode) has more linear voltage gain than a single transistor (CCS load). If you take a given transistor amp, then you can always build a tube amp that has lower distortion and more power if you are free to use as many tubes as there are transistors in the transistor amp.
Do you have a problem with reading comprehension? Nowhere in my post did I make any comparison to an analog source at all. I cited peer reviewed research showing problems with digital implementations (and jitter is not completely eliminated in even the best digital systems). You've made a fool out of yourself with your reactionary post.
It's not simple waveform shaping, and you can't just use simple passive networks to get it. Tube amps may have higher THD, but THD doesn't correlate with blind tests of perception, because the type of distortion matters, and THD is unweighted. Tubes and transistors have different types of nonlinearity. Tubes have a 3/2 power law, whereas transistors are exponential. This, and common circuit topology used in the respective camps, result in tube amps having high THD but mostly consisting of even low order harmonics, which are inaudible to as much as a few percent. Many tube amps are also in class A and thus avoid the crossover distortion that is audible in the parts per million. Then the clipping characteristics of tubes are much better, whereas when a solid state amp clips, you get huge amounts of transient intermodulation-like effects. Various other things such as masking distortions created by say jitter in the digital system, speaker interactions, etc., can play apart. Finally, tubes lack the thermal memory distortion that transistors have; though these can be dealt with in solid state amps, it's rarely done: http://peufeu.free.fr/audio/memory/
Jitter is actually a bigger problem than the filtering. Plus, 96 kHz... that means even higher clock frequency and more jitter sensitivity. It's a big issue, and the distortions produced when jitter (phase noise) gets in the DAC chip are complex and audible in the ppm, unlike the low order even harmonics of class A tube or MOSFET amps. A good technical paper on the nature of jitter-induced distortions in digital audio: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
Class D amps have a long way to go. THD is meaningless, as the blind test studies by GedLee that were presented at the Audio Engineering Society convention a few years ago show, THD doesn't correlate with the distortion detectability, since the type of distortion is far more important. Crossover distortion from class B and AB stages, and effects of jitter, are audible in the parts per million. There's another type of distortion that doesn't affect THD measures at all, but is perceptually significant: thermal memory distortion. There's a good description of it and ways to decrease it here: http://peufeu.free.fr/audio/memory/ (there's also an AES paper linked there that describes how to measure it in real amps). Of course, tubes don't exhibit such distortion, and is my guess as to one of the reasons some people prefer them despite higher THD than typical solid state amps (however, this higher THD is simply due to most tube amps being simple; a tube with constant current load is more linear than any single solid state device; you can easily make a tube amp as linear as a solid state one if you use as many tubes as you would transistors).
In regards to vinyl, I do agree that overall CDs win. But your general argument on quality fails, because you forget that the human ear weighs different distortions differently (blind testing by GedLee presented at the AES a few years ago shows perception of distortion doesn't correlate with an unweighted metric such as THD). Low order even harmonics are undetectable until several percent. Crossover distortion from class B or AB output stages is detectable in the parts per million (and the presence of one distortion doesn't necessarily mask the detectability of another). The problem with digital is jitter (phase noise). Jitter in the I2S signal going into the DAC chip is converted to amplitude errors of a very complex nature, and are easily audible. There's a fairly technical but fascinating paper from the journal of the AES here http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
Worse, most DAC chips use high oversampling (usually 8x), which further increases sensitivity to jitter, as to avoid the need for a steep anti-imaging filter in the subsequent analog stages. There are other problems in a digital system, such as the digital filters in the resampling hardware, which are only partially alleviated by 24 bit 96 kHz systems.
Besides mixing and recording, most consumer digital gear has very poor jitter rejection. Jitter (phase noise) getting in the DAC creates amplitude errors of a very complex nature, and unlike some types of distortion (say the common low order even harmonics of a speaker or class A MOSFET or tube amp), is audible in the parts per million. A good paper from the journal of the Audio Engineering Society is http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
On the same website, there's another AES paper describing the jitter problems added by the ubiquitous S/PDIF interface.
Thus the solution: build your own. You get full customization, a hobby, and save money (time doesn't count since it's a hobby). Some resources: www.diyaudio.com www.diyhifi.org www.head-fi.org www.headwize.com http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/index.php
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, I hope you have better ways to impress girls...
like a website that lets you launch missiles
Please, what's the URL? I won't tell anyone else, I promise!
On /. it is acceptable to respond to not just a story, but solely to the contents of a post.
Your analogy fails for technical reasons. A vacuum triode's voltage gain nonlinearity is a 3/2 power law, whereas a transistor's is exponential. These result in different distortion profiles in a circuit, and the two are suited for different power levels, voltage handling, and load impedances. Vacuum tubes go to hundreds of thousands of volts, and up to two megawatts of power per tube (Eimac has some examples of the latter on their website). In regards to consumer applications, a vacuum tube is bigger and need heater power, but one triode is a more linear voltage gain device than one transistor, so if you take a given solid state amplifier and build a vacuum tube one where you're allowed to use as many tubes as there are transistors in the SS one, you can build a more linear amplifier with the tubes.
Works for me too. That clearly means it's something to do with the way you've set up your system or browser options.
I thought relying mostly on gluconeogenesis is unhealthy. That's why the FDA says at least 60% of daily caloric intake should be in the form of carbohydrates.
and ignoring all corroborative data meeting his criteria that have been published since then.
Please cite what data contradicts Edwards' conclusions.
Didn't you sue for wrongful imprisonment after you were cleared?
As usual, you omitted the most interesting part. What happened with the lawyer and wives, and were the men compensated--was justice served? These are such obvious questions that I fail to see the reason you did not anticipate them, other than to tease and frustrate us--I see already one other poster got curious.
What the hell are VP and FSM?
Do you have a reading comprehension problem? The boy is fifteen years old. Where did you get that twelve years old idea from? Pull it out of your ass?
Actually, there very much are genetic reasons.
It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok.
I see things very differently: political correctness making a problem where there is none. Male and female brains are quite different. While each individual case should be judged equally, it is obviously plausible that differences in enrollment are due to biological differences. It seems to me there are significant leftist vestiges believing that nurture overrides nature, and thus environment and raising are the main factors, whereas evolutionary psychologists like Pinker are consistently demonstrating the opposite with their research.
I think bringing in the analogy of the issue of racial differences is in order here. It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok. I've no doubt that if Edward's statistical technique were applied to male-female cognitive anthropometrics, the separation will become clear.
What's funny is, even as I'm about to start a CS job in May, I'm already thinking of starting a business, and indeed working on a product. But the funny part is that the business has nothing to do with CS...
At the same time, an acquaintance that did electrical engineering, and one that did biochemistry, each started a software companies. Makes me wonder about the worth of specialized degrees.
I see things very differently: political correctness making a problem where there is none. Male and female brains are quite different. While each individual case should be judged equally, it is obviously plausible that differences in enrollment are due to biological differences. It seems to me there are significant leftist vestiges believing that nurture overrides nature, and thus environment and raising are the main factors, whereas evolutionary psychologists like Pinker are consistently demonstrating the opposite with their research.
I think bringing in the analogy of the issue of racial differences is in order here. It became popular among anthropologists that races weren't really real, since for any selected phenotype, variation within a race would exceed that besides a race. This was all nice and cozy with politically correctness, until someone did multidimensional cluster analysis and proved once and for all that races are real: Human Genetic Diversity: A.W.F. Edwards. "Lewontin's Fallacy". BioEssays vol.25 no.8. Aug 2003, pp 798-801. After this publication, there's no scientific sense behind affirmative action, it's all political correctness gone amok. I've no doubt that if Edward's statistical technique were applied to male-female cognitive anthropometrics, the separation will become clear.
BTW, if you're on IRC, if you go to Rizon's #diyaudio channel, I'm Quince there and I can discuss this further.
I don't have a problem with transistor amps. I've built clones of the Pass Labs XA MOSFET amps to drive my low end (my high end is 1800 Watt DC glow discharge plasma derived from Hill's design, minus the helium). And as good as your Sunfires may be, there are far better transistor amps--Halcro's top end amps have the lowest distortion of any commercial amplifier.
Tubes can provide far more power than a transistor, it's just that most audio designers are a bit scared of the power tubes, with their high voltage and need for active cooling (blower, but there are other solutions, and making it quiet is not difficult in my experience). An Eimac 8974 does 2 MEGAWATTS! Transistors are limited to a few kilowatts. Large tubes are still common in radio transmitters, military, scientific (accelerators), and power grid applications. And, they work just fine for audio. Small transmitter tubes such as the 4x250A, which are 250 Watt beam power tetrodes, are used in a few DIY and commercial audio amlpifiers.
Thus, your statement that the transistor amp wins has no technical backing in the power area as well. It simply has to do with economics--quality output transformers for tube amps are expensive, and speakers are designed low impedance with solid state drive in mind (though there is an alternative, a switchmode output transformer which is cheap and has no distortion in the audio band since it operates at ~400 kHz, but is unfortunately patented and thus there's only one company using the design, David Berning Company). A single tube (triode) has more linear voltage gain than a single transistor (CCS load). If you take a given transistor amp, then you can always build a tube amp that has lower distortion and more power if you are free to use as many tubes as there are transistors in the transistor amp.
Do you have a problem with reading comprehension? Nowhere in my post did I make any comparison to an analog source at all. I cited peer reviewed research showing problems with digital implementations (and jitter is not completely eliminated in even the best digital systems). You've made a fool out of yourself with your reactionary post.
It's not simple waveform shaping, and you can't just use simple passive networks to get it. Tube amps may have higher THD, but THD doesn't correlate with blind tests of perception, because the type of distortion matters, and THD is unweighted. Tubes and transistors have different types of nonlinearity. Tubes have a 3/2 power law, whereas transistors are exponential. This, and common circuit topology used in the respective camps, result in tube amps having high THD but mostly consisting of even low order harmonics, which are inaudible to as much as a few percent. Many tube amps are also in class A and thus avoid the crossover distortion that is audible in the parts per million. Then the clipping characteristics of tubes are much better, whereas when a solid state amp clips, you get huge amounts of transient intermodulation-like effects. Various other things such as masking distortions created by say jitter in the digital system, speaker interactions, etc., can play apart. Finally, tubes lack the thermal memory distortion that transistors have; though these can be dealt with in solid state amps, it's rarely done: http://peufeu.free.fr/audio/memory/
Jitter is actually a bigger problem than the filtering. Plus, 96 kHz... that means even higher clock frequency and more jitter sensitivity. It's a big issue, and the distortions produced when jitter (phase noise) gets in the DAC chip are complex and audible in the ppm, unlike the low order even harmonics of class A tube or MOSFET amps. A good technical paper on the nature of jitter-induced distortions in digital audio: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
Class D amps have a long way to go. THD is meaningless, as the blind test studies by GedLee that were presented at the Audio Engineering Society convention a few years ago show, THD doesn't correlate with the distortion detectability, since the type of distortion is far more important. Crossover distortion from class B and AB stages, and effects of jitter, are audible in the parts per million. There's another type of distortion that doesn't affect THD measures at all, but is perceptually significant: thermal memory distortion. There's a good description of it and ways to decrease it here: http://peufeu.free.fr/audio/memory/ (there's also an AES paper linked there that describes how to measure it in real amps). Of course, tubes don't exhibit such distortion, and is my guess as to one of the reasons some people prefer them despite higher THD than typical solid state amps (however, this higher THD is simply due to most tube amps being simple; a tube with constant current load is more linear than any single solid state device; you can easily make a tube amp as linear as a solid state one if you use as many tubes as you would transistors).
In regards to vinyl, I do agree that overall CDs win. But your general argument on quality fails, because you forget that the human ear weighs different distortions differently (blind testing by GedLee presented at the AES a few years ago shows perception of distortion doesn't correlate with an unweighted metric such as THD). Low order even harmonics are undetectable until several percent. Crossover distortion from class B or AB output stages is detectable in the parts per million (and the presence of one distortion doesn't necessarily mask the detectability of another). The problem with digital is jitter (phase noise). Jitter in the I2S signal going into the DAC chip is converted to amplitude errors of a very complex nature, and are easily audible. There's a fairly technical but fascinating paper from the journal of the AES here http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
Worse, most DAC chips use high oversampling (usually 8x), which further increases sensitivity to jitter, as to avoid the need for a steep anti-imaging filter in the subsequent analog stages. There are other problems in a digital system, such as the digital filters in the resampling hardware, which are only partially alleviated by 24 bit 96 kHz systems.
Besides mixing and recording, most consumer digital gear has very poor jitter rejection. Jitter (phase noise) getting in the DAC creates amplitude errors of a very complex nature, and unlike some types of distortion (say the common low order even harmonics of a speaker or class A MOSFET or tube amp), is audible in the parts per million. A good paper from the journal of the Audio Engineering Society is http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
On the same website, there's another AES paper describing the jitter problems added by the ubiquitous S/PDIF interface.
It's not just about high frequencies. Jitter (phase noise) getting into the DAC chip creates amplitude distortions that affect a wide range of frequencies. There have been enough papers in the journal of the Audio Engineering Society on jitter so I won't go into it any further; here's a good example: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/malc olmspubdocs/C134%20Paper%20121st%20convention%20(c orrected).pdf
Thus the solution: build your own. You get full customization, a hobby, and save money (time doesn't count since it's a hobby). Some resources: www.diyaudio.com www.diyhifi.org www.head-fi.org www.headwize.com http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/index.php
"Archival vinyl" is an oxymoron unless you never play the album.
That's BS, because you can buy a touchless turntable that uses a laser to read the record.