If I had to describe what most people image a tube amp to sound like, the tube sound, it would be something like the Leak stereo 20. For some people this syrupy sweet slightly zingy sound is the essence of tubeness.
I had one as my first tube amp, it had a cymbal sustain like I have never heard on any other amp - this was the one thing I really missed about it. it seemed as if everything was washed with Gold.
I sold it and started building my own tube amps (after a diversion through zen amps and gainclones) and have never built anything which sounds remotely like a Stereo 20. I have crept closer and closer to a pure natural sound as I have gone on. Clarity and Timbre are the qualities which I have come to associate with the valve sound.
Shoog
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and those are the qualities which I have come to associate with my Super Leach power ampS, effortless, dynamic, NOT TIRING TO LISTEN TO....😀
Horns are to compromised for my taste, cannot be implemented on a practical scale in most houses. I have gone open baffle using vintage German drivers (Isophon and Gratz field coil), these high sensitivity speakers can work with 1 or 2 watts.
I think if you can keep things down to one or two stages then clarity and Timbre will be the result.
Shoog
If you add up all the steps in the signal path between when the acoustic waves hit the microphones until the signal enters your amplifier, then there must have been probably dozens of "stages" on the way. Why would it be so important to keep it down to "one or two stages" in the final amplification device in the chain?
Chris
I would not have a clue how to 'voice' an amp, as I have never studied FX boxes. I have a simple brain: amps are just meant to amplify.TiMBoZ said:
Otherwise known as 'theory' i.e. established facts about how electronic devices and circuits work. The devices and circuits necessarily will follow theory even if their designer does not.
If what you say is true, then just add a resistor to the output of an SS amp. I can't imagine why losing control of the bass resonance could 'improve' the mid-range but I am not a speaker expert.
Most recordings are frankly rubbish - barely listenable - horrible.
When you get the rare privilege of listening to a good live recording made with just a few simple mic's and minimal mixing - its a revelation. Some of my best records were recorded this way back in the 50's.
Shoog
I presume there is considerable hyperbole in your statement that "Most recordings are frankly rubbish - barely listenable - horrible," so it's not clear how literally to take it.
Probably, with only rare exceptions, the 1950s recordings you speak of were not directly recorded to disc in the studio, but via a tape recorder. So there were still lots of stages of amplification, etc., involved in their production.
Chris
True - but how well do they do it really? E.G. into complex loads. And since none are perfect, are the sins of some more heinous than the sins of others? Are there certain defects, even when tiny, that grate on our ears - while others more gross simple don't annoy?
Many people seem to think so - and that's the topic.
At least half of the modern studio records I would place in the category of horrible.
I am thinking of many of the old Bluenote Jazz recordings - almost live. Many of the Miles Davies recordings done in single takes as an ensemble in the studio.
Unfortunately if you haven't heard the difference I cannot explain it to you, so you can put that down to subjectivity if you like.
Shoog
I am thinking of many of the old Bluenote Jazz recordings - almost live. Many of the Miles Davies recordings done in single takes as an ensemble in the studio.
Unfortunately if you haven't heard the difference I cannot explain it to you, so you can put that down to subjectivity if you like.
Shoog
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Of course, but some people do have accurate listening skills. Just because they are subject to the same auditory peccadilloes as anyone else does not mean that they commit them as often, or have not learned skills beyond the average.
There seems to be a strange denial of real listening skills on this forum (and some others). Is that akin to saying that skills can't be acquired or trusted? Is it a akin to saying that Lionel Messi, Derek Jeter and Inbee Park are human and subject to the same problems and mistakes as anyone else, therefore they can't be trusted more than anyone else in Football, Basketball or Golf? Because they do make mistakes, their skills are an illusion?
This is a good point. Some listeners are more skilled than others. This is the weakness in Evenharmonic's total dismissal of sighted A-B tests. There is a difference between a sober listener and a drunk/drugged one, a tired and a fresh one, and a listener who is aware of the pitfalls of A-B testing and factors them in and one who hasn't a clue. There are also personality trait differences in regard to enthusiasm and exaggeration versus sober judgement. Listeners are not the same. I can see Evenharmonic's argument that if you can't trust listeners you can't trust their results - fair enough. But in practise the situation may not be so severe.
As for the old argument that "musicians have mediocre sound systems" there's a lot of truth in this - and why not? They get their music from playing instruments live. What could be better than that. Plus they hear music in their heads, and also they enjoy silence. And they're not engineers. Several reasons why they may not prioritise their sound systems. But not prioritising their sound systems is NOT the same as not being able to distinguish subtle musical differences. Musicians are very good at this. So IF they wanted to use their ears for critical listening to hi-fi they can easily do this. And some do.
Some do it well. Others less well. A good test for 'doing it well' is that amps become indistinguishable by ears alone. Curiously, some listeners have a preference for amps which demonstrably do it badly - shown by measurements, circuit analysis and the fact that the difference can be heard by ears alone. Nothing wrong with that as a matter of taste, except when they start to claim that their distortion is somehow superior to other's fidelity.Pano said:
Yes indeed. This is easy to show. The brain is actually very good at RECEIVING signals from the senses. See this:
The Sound Learning Centre Processing
Sound - 100,000 bits per second. However the brain is poor at PROCESSING the information. Our conscious mind can only deal with one subject at a time at a rate of less than 100 bits per second.
So there we are. We can HEAR all kinds of subtle information. But all the inadequacies and mistakes come in when we process this information and our conscious brain outputs the results. Add to that the fact that modern theories of consciousness estimate that the huge majority of processing is done below consciousness and we have a recipe for all kinds of subjective differences.
So the "skilled listening" is in the realm of the processing we do as listeners, not the "golden ears". Our ears, when young and healthy, are extremely good information receivers.
Most people have the skills, but they haven't practiced "observing" their hearing picking up the difference - when they hear a system working properly, they may say things like "Gee, that's special!", "Man, that sound is magic", "It just sounds so real!" - so, they can easily pick the qualities that distinguish better sound, but they probably will find it hard to point to, to identify, exactly why those properties are so evident.
If true (the linked site helpfully does not give any citation), that's actually quite poor. The much-maligned CD standard is an order of magnitude higher. If you try to make a microphone out of jelly, transmit its signals via ionic conduction, then process it through a slow device with a limited number of channels, you'll get an idea of how acute the human ear actually is. It's a marvel of evolution, but it's a crummy transducer, hooked to a crummy processor.
All of which is beside the point- no one, and I mean no one, has ever demonstrated an audible difference between amplifiers using one type of device or another if they have the same (or sufficiently low) output impedance, same (or sufficiently low) distortion, yadda yadda. That's the subject of this thread, not fanciful handwaving about musicians and ears.
Demonstrate that there's an intrinsic difference in audible properties depending on the device and you'll have shaken the earth, because you'll demonstrate phenomena that are undetectable in mission critical high precision applications outside audio. Perhaps someone will, but since we seem to be able to design and build interplanetary spacecraft, radio telescopes, MRI diagnostic machines, single photon counting systems, supercolliders, microsurgical tools, and fly-by-wire aircraft using conventional electronic engineering, I seriously doubt it.
Pano, analytical listening skills can certainly be learned (I've put some effort into it myself), no-one denies it. But that affects not one whit the ability to fool ones-self. It's just as easy for you and me to fool ourselves as it is for Joe Average off the street.
Let me tell an anecdote. I have a very smart friend with very sharp ears and lots of training and practice in analyzing sound from hifi systems. He started playing with the delays in my crossover to match the woofer and the other drivers (there's roughly a meter of path length difference), which I hadn't yet bothered doing. After setting the delays, he switched back and forth several times between delayed and undelayed and declared that the new delay definitely improved things.
Checking it over a week or two later, I noticed that he'd actually set the delay the wrong way, i.e., he had delayed the woofer, which was farther back than the other drivers! Now, does that mean that this guy wasn't skilled? Or that he couldn't recognize phase shift and the resulting notch filtering? No, not at all. But because he expected his delay to improve things, that's what he "heard" regardless of his excellent skills and analytical capability.
Poor fellow- he suffered from having a human brain!
Let me tell an anecdote. I have a very smart friend with very sharp ears and lots of training and practice in analyzing sound from hifi systems. He started playing with the delays in my crossover to match the woofer and the other drivers (there's roughly a meter of path length difference), which I hadn't yet bothered doing. After setting the delays, he switched back and forth several times between delayed and undelayed and declared that the new delay definitely improved things.
Checking it over a week or two later, I noticed that he'd actually set the delay the wrong way, i.e., he had delayed the woofer, which was farther back than the other drivers! Now, does that mean that this guy wasn't skilled? Or that he couldn't recognize phase shift and the resulting notch filtering? No, not at all. But because he expected his delay to improve things, that's what he "heard" regardless of his excellent skills and analytical capability.
Poor fellow- he suffered from having a human brain!
When I was in college I lived in a trailer with a good friend who had a nice sound system. We used his system which was a set of Klipsch Heresey speakers, a Crown (D150?), Nachamichi tape deck, Techniques turntable (don't remember the cartridge) etc.
When he went home for the summer, I stayed and went to school and worked part time.
I went back to my system which was a small Pioneer receiver (15W iirc), Kenwood KL-5050 speakers, Gerard 95B turntable with whatever cartridge came with it.
I was amazed at the distortion I heard from my system after having listened to his system for 6 months. It was not just hearing a difference, but recognizing what was happening, like being able to tell that clipping was taking place on higher passages, etc.
I still have the KL-5050s but the rest of the system is long gone.
Well, if you choose to call psychology, a discipline with 150 years history, "fanciful" that's up to you. It's a point of view. And I think a lot of posters are responding to the title "what is tube sound" and adding their views to this. Are you saying that since "nobody can distinguish between amplifiers" there's no such thing as tube sound?
Since "nobody can distinguish between amplifiers" are your words and not mine, I can't really comment. Likewise, since I didn't say that psychology was fanciful, I can't comment on that, either. It's probably best to deal with what I said rather than what the voices in your head are saying if you want me to be able to respond in any coherent and understandable manner.
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