Why tube amps?

[stevieboy]

My biggest problem with tubes (and this is very personal to me, anyone may have differing ideas...) is the fact that since different tubes have different sound signatures, what is it that i am listening to? I prefer neutral setups. It is a personal quest to get sound that the artist wanted to convey.... An impossibility of sorts, but at least many SS setups allow you to come as close to that as possible.

Absolutely right Malvai,

It's the tube one is listening to. The amp is merely a factor or a percentage of how well that designer has managed to extract what that particular tube is capable of doing.

Currently I feel like Baskin Robbins cos I've got on tap three power tubes, bout 10 input tubes and 10 rectifier tubes and 4 driver tubes to choose from depending on how I want the presentation to change.

Tubes for me though tend to capture the soul and mental/ physical state of the artist more than anything else. One aspect is capturing the tone/timbre etc of the musical instrument another angle is capturing the fact that the guitarist just prior to the live show had a spat with the singer and is blistering his way through an inspired solo. The latter is what shines through superbly with tubes for me. And that intangible is more important for me than details in the music or a triangle at 1.29 or a snare drum at 3.04.

Regards

 

[quad]

Lynn Olson wrote a two part article, which makes some
interesting observations about tube audio and SS amps, esp the
early ones -

A Tiny History of High Fidelity, Part 1
A Tiny History of High Fidelity, Part 2

 

[malvai]

Absolutely right Malvai,

It's the tube one is listening to. The amp is merely a factor or a percentage of how well that designer has managed to extract what that particular tube is capable of doing.

Currently I feel like Baskin Robbins cos I've got on tap three power tubes, bout 10 input tubes and 10 rectifier tubes and 4 driver tubes to choose from depending on how I want the presentation to change.

Tubes for me though tend to capture the soul and mental/ physical state of the artist more than anything else. One aspect is capturing the tone/timbre etc of the musical instrument another angle is capturing the fact that the guitarist just prior to the live show had a spat with the singer and is blistering his way through an inspired solo. The latter is what shines through superbly with tubes for me. And that intangible is more important for me than details in the music or a triangle at 1.29 or a snare drum at 3.04.

Regards

I like that! That is one of the things that even I like about my set up... it captures the mood and presents the details as well! But or sure man, I gotta check out what you're doing with your set up. Cos it seems to me that we both are aiming for the same things, but approaching it from two opposite ends of the metaphorical tunnel!

 

[malvai]

Duplicate post...

 

[hifiashok]

The Hampshire Collection

 

[psychotropic]

i hate to sound churlish, but all this 'emotion' and 'soul' and stuff.....aren't these the listeners projections? factually what the tube is doing is adding its colour, beautiful as it may be.

I think i get what stevie says about sounds in nature, the pleasant ones have more of even order and lower order harmonics and the more unpleasant ones have odd-order and higher order harmonics, and this is perhaps the reason why the harmonic distortion characteristics of the tube sound so pleasant.

But that still doesn't mean it's not being euphonic. The euphonics can of course be described by the listener variously as emotion and feel and soul, but at the end of the day it's euphonics right? i mean, it's not like the vacuum tube went and chatted up the musician, read his soul and then transplanted it into your listening room

once again let me clarify, i am not knocking tubes one bit, i am just seeking some clarity.

 

[ajay124]

@psychtropic
I would not call what you say 'churlish'.Rather it's a valid counterpoint.With a decent,neutral solid state amp a small group of listeners may be able to reach consensus about the sonic charecteristics of the amp.Would be much more difficult with a Tube amp where every listener would maybe react with a different 'poetry'....quite like a french wine where a 'connoisseur' may discover seductive notes of liquorice!pepper!hazelnut!cassis!vanilla! on the nose or palate,while the rest of the guys feel they are gulping down a 'bitter tasting' 'medicinal' 'acidic' concoction!

 

[sidvee]

Many of the higher end tube equipment manufacturers recommend only 1 kind of tube and many even discourage tube rolling - so I would assume that they have voiced their product with this particular tube and that would be the baseline one needs to audition. For instance with my ARC LS26 preamp it is clearly stated that it will perform its best with Sovtek 6H30 and the manual discourages other tubes. I recall the same thing with the Ayon CD1s.
This doesnt mean that you cant tube roll at your own risk but the manfr. does not condone it.
Cheers
Sid

 

[stevieboy]

Hi Psychotropic,

Not churlish but very churnish I'd say churning up up murky waters into even grayer shades. That's the lawyer in you speaking eh?

Well the fact is one has liner notes in albums, reviews on the net, journals doing interviews/reviews, artists giving interviews themselves and lots of other material whereby one knows just how the band was at a point in time, tired from a tour and recording cos they had a contract to fulfill, a last tour where the guitarist knew it was his last before the band disbanded, a promo tour where the band was seeking to establish itself and other details from which one can judge pretty closely just what the artist was going through.

Then what I was also referring to was notes being played one after the other versus notes being played in a very specific style, phrasing, notes being played in relation to the time signature, pauses before hitting a note, how long the note is allowed to ring, all of which differ quite significantly from artist to artist. These subtle cues come alive for me with a SET amp. I'm getting very specific here, SET and not push pull. That too with a few tubes. I've heard a lot of solid state amps where things are louder, better bass, treble etc but it all seems homogenised. It's just a bass guitar going note, note note or a guitarist going solo solo solo.

Then again you have the song topic and lyrics themselves which give you a cue as to the emotion the artists are putting into the song, sad, blatantly sexual, enthusiastic, happy, wistful etc. These emotions are what come alive too.

Of course this does not mean everyone's gonna hear this. Personal listening also comes into play along with preferences.

Regards

 

[ajinkya]

Here's an IEEE article (1998) on tubes in music. Informative reading.
IEEE Spectrum: The Cool Sound of Tubes

 

[gobble]

Here's an IEEE article (1998) on tubes in music. Informative reading.
IEEE Spectrum: The Cool Sound of Tubes

Another interesting article

IEEE Spectrum: The Cool Sound of Tubes

HTH

Copy Cat!! hyeah:hyeah:hyeah:

All that talk about tubes coloring sound as if it is a dishonest act ... I quote from the article for a better perspective -

Speaking about solid-state designs, Whitlock asserted that they "...depend on huge amounts of negative feedback to 'fix everything', including crossover distortion. Op amps commonly have open-loop THD in the 20 percent to 70 percent range. Stabilization generally requires open-loop gain to fall at 6 dB per octave. This means that, for ultrasonic input signals, the op amp has little gain margin to fix its own distortion. The ultrasonic signals, along with distortion products, are fed to the next stage for further distortion and intermodulation. This intermodulation creates audible, but non-harmonically related, artifacts which contaminate the noise floor and mask many subtle features of the music.

Cheers

 

[ajinkya]

Sorry, didn't notice your post at all hyeah: I will try deleting my post then.

Edit: ...Can't see any option of doing this...it remains forever on this forum now ... as a copy-cat post ... a black mark against my character!

 

[psychotropic]

yeah, that is a very interesting article, but also very obviously written by a tube aficianado. i couldn't make a lot of sense of much of it, including the paragraph that gobble quoted. can anyone explain? do all SS amps use negative feedback? aren't there designs which are inherently clean? what about digital amps like the tripath based ones?

Copy Cat!! hyeah:hyeah:hyeah:

All that talk about tubes coloring sound as if it is a dishonest act ... I quote from the article for a better perspective -



Cheers

 

[gobble]

yeah, that is a very interesting article, but also very obviously written by a tube aficianado. i couldn't make a lot of sense of much of it, including the paragraph that gobble quoted. can anyone explain? do all SS amps use negative feedback? aren't there designs which are inherently clean? what about digital amps like the tripath based ones?

Who cares?!! We are all here to fling mud at each other in one big bash .. and I found that little piece of dirt I could fling ... hyeah: :yahoo:

Ok Kidding ... For the SS amps that don't do what you think they all should do but are not sure if they all really do ... you will always hear the designer rave about the "Tube like " qualities of that little marvel of a solid-state power amp. Muhawhawhahahahahahaha! hyeah:

Cheers

 

[stevieboy]

yeah, that is a very interesting article, but also very obviously written by a tube aficianado. i couldn't make a lot of sense of much of it, including the paragraph that gobble quoted. can anyone explain? do all SS amps use negative feedback? aren't there designs which are inherently clean? what about digital amps like the tripath based ones?

A lot of push pull tube amps also use feedback, some global, some local I'll leave the tech parts to someone who actually understands it.

Most SET amps don't use feedback and the power of push pull amps vs purity and linearity of the triodes shows.

regards

 

[thevortex]

i hate to sound churlish, but all this 'emotion' and 'soul' and stuff.....aren't these the listeners projections? factually what the tube is doing is adding its colour, beautiful as it may be.

I think i get what stevie says about sounds in nature, the pleasant ones have more of even order and lower order harmonics and the more unpleasant ones have odd-order and higher order harmonics, and this is perhaps the reason why the harmonic distortion characteristics of the tube sound so pleasant.

But that still doesn't mean it's not being euphonic. The euphonics can of course be described by the listener variously as emotion and feel and soul, but at the end of the day it's euphonics right? i mean, it's not like the vacuum tube went and chatted up the musician, read his soul and then transplanted it into your listening room

once again let me clarify, i am not knocking tubes one bit, i am just seeking some clarity.

Vinay - you still have my standing invitation to come over with your harshest tracks to see if the tube setup I have 'smooths' it down or does something else to it.

Rest assured, it is going to sound different to the amp that you may use. Or any other Solid State amp. But I would not assume that a tube amp always makes it easy to listen to music when it is recorded harsh.

I have old Bollywood 60's and 70s songs which cannot but sound harsh given the recording and the quality of the MP3s I have. Thankfully a lot of the music then was voice based. But even with the meagre amount of instrumentation you will be able to hear just how distorted and harsh it sounds.

Again - 'Morph the Cat' sounds like an entirely different track now than what it did when you last came over.

 

[psychotropic]

hey bala of course, and i plan to do that. but my question is more theoretical/conceptual. I'm trying to put my finger on this 'emotion', 'soul' thing that tube fans talk about. And no I am not happy with 'you can't put your finger on it' .

And frankly if it's a harsh recording i wouldn't mind it being smoothed out at all. i don't believe in fidelity at all costs. i'd say a good objective would be fidelity on good recordings, smoothening on harsh recordidngs.

 

[captrajesh]

Who cares?!! We are all here to fling mud at each other in one big bash .. and I found that little piece of dirt I could fling ... hyeah: :yahoo:

Ok Kidding ... For the SS amps that don't do what you think they all should do but are not sure if they all really do ... you will always hear the designer rave about the "Tube like " qualities of that little marvel of a solid-state power amp. Muhawhawhahahahahahaha! hyeah:

Hey Gobble, didn't know the little red devil is actually a cat on the wall.hyeah:

@thevortex Your invitation to bring my APs over stands I guess. I'm still to come to terms with the SQ resulting by driving their mid bass drivers full range, courtesy Rajiv but would also love to listen to your now tamed single drivers.

 

[Dr.Bass]

Even after multiple requests by the OP this thread has turned into a tube vs SS debatehyeah:...that was inevitable.

I am from the neutral camp. As Arj has mentioned, it is the implementation that decides the sound. But yes, there is something special about tubes. Apart from the ubiquitous tone, mood, warmth etal, I find tubes to do something more. They make the presentation more 3D. They illuminate the soundstage. There is more air and glow to everything in the stage. Together this gives the feeling of real instruments and live performance. 3D is the key word here IMO.
Now these attributes are present in even an entry level tube equipment (not all but many). Beyond this, whatever color, warmth, sweetness is added is a matter of design. But for an SS do deliver the same level of 3D-ness and realism it is neither easy nor cheap. Some SS deliberately try to sound tubey and that is real disaster, they sound artificial. They are like drinking canned juice. Good SS design will sound real without letting you think about tube vs SS. They rather give you a feel that you are NOT listening to it at all.

 

[gobble]

But for an SS do deliver the same level of 3D-ness and realism it is neither easy nor cheap.Some SS deliberately try to sound tubey and that is real disaster, they sound artificial. They are like drinking canned juice. Good SS design will sound real without letting you think about tube vs SS. They rather give you a feel that you are NOT listening to it at all.

So the benchmark for a good SS gear is ummm ... Tubes?

I mean either they try and make them tube like, but not overtly so as to inherit the drawbacks of bad tube gear hyeah:hyeah:hyeah:

Cheers