i guess, another indiana jones in quest for holy grail? 🙂 magical "wire with gain" ?
even if active device had not distortion, at least the passive components would modify the signal a bit
(resistor thermal noise, dielectric nonlinearities,..)
how many people eat food without any spices? had chance to taste such cooked chicken, even without salt. was so close to puke
music is food for ears, so enjoy it as much as possible
Actually I quit using the XSE transformers and find the wider BW transformers preferable. I was just surprised how good the XSE transformers sounded considering their specs and price.
Even with their limited BW, I still got a nice sound-stage.
Even with their limited BW, I still got a nice sound-stage.
Interesting findings. I'm curious, how did you set up the comparison? How many times, how closely level matched, how quickly amps were switched... etc. Would you mind sharing those?
As for what kind of tube amps I asked about earlier...
You need to distinguish between produced (music) sound and reproduced (music) sound. The good job of latter is to be audibly faithful.i guess, another indiana jones in quest for holy grail? 🙂 magical "wire with gain" ?
even if active device had not distortion, at least the passive components would modify the signal a bit
(resistor thermal noise, dielectric nonlinearities,..)
how many people eat food without any spices? had chance to taste such cooked chicken, even without salt. was so close to puke
music is food for ears, so enjoy it as much as possible
Again, that's called "preference". It can be completely separate from the hi-fi business.
One thing I find interesting is that I don't remember a single advertisement back during the transition from tube amps to SS amps, that ever claimed the SS amp "sounds better than a tube amp" or something similar.
It was always about "greater power", and "lower distortion".
It was always about "greater power", and "lower distortion".
It shouldn't be seperate if the idea is to bring pleasure to people or yourself (sonicly speaking of course!). There's no hi-fi business if no-one likes your amps..
Speaking of the SS/Valve transition...what is to be made of Voltage vs. Current drive and squaring that with the procedure used in Richard Clark's amp challenge to match each amplifier's output impedance in to the speakers used in the challenge?
The 6LQ6 is a TV horizontal deflection PA. Look at the specs: there is no mention of any sort of audio use there. Same deal for my fav type: the 6BQ6GA. It's also a TV HD, though not as powerful as the 6LQ6. It's a damn shame they're not made anymore, but still a lot of NOS is available. The KT88, OTOH, is a definite audio type, so it would still be in production.
The other big factor with these TV HD types is that 40 years ago, ESSSSSS-loads of them disappeared into ham rigs, and especially illegal CB power amps, that weren't the best of designs. Either deliberately, or accidentally, these rigs ate up these tubes. Back then, they didn't care since you could stop by just about any TV repair shop to replace them. There just aren't so many left over for audio usage these days. For those colour TV HD beasts, your best bet is to go with the odd heater voltage versions. A lot of TV tubes were made with a variety of heater voltages as these were "daisy chained" across raw AC mains working with no PTX DC supplies. (Check the specs for the brags of how these types pull bigamps at ~100V plate voltages. This was a requirement if the HD system was to start with just the 100V (give or take) that you can get from half wave rectifying 120Vrms mains before the damper diodes could start making "B Boost".)
So, if you're going into production, you either need a big stock of these types that are available only as NOS, or you need to limit yourself to types that are still currently in production.
What would you call that? Since you are not talking about the fidelity, I want to ask.
Are you talking about the aesthetics of amps?
That means faithful to the listener and where measurement can't help, only assessment of people's opinions (which can be both flawed and insightful). Judging what a listener thinks or feels or whether they are psychologically biased or if judgement is from a truthful deep unconcious native instinct of what is real, is next to impossible no matter what blind faith people might have in this or that type of test.
?
You said that personal preference has no place in the hifi business..
It has a very large place in the hifi business, even if you use the term "hifi business" broadly to include hobbiests with no money changing hands. Why would I want to end up with an amp that I didn't have a strong sonic preference for?
There are people in the hifi enthusiast community who openly state that they strive to fullfill theory first and then are consequently happy with the sound it produces because they're in the "knowledge" it measures "perfectly" and therefore it must be producing perfect sound.. I'd guess though that they were in the minority
Why can't measurement help? How do you know that? We can measure everything we can hear and beyond. You think there are sound waves we can hear but can't be measured?
DBT of audio gears have been done for decades for producing unbiased evidence. I guess you are not aware of this.
Nobody who understands electronics and measurement will believe that any amp is perfect. They may believe that it is good enough, and therefore will sound good enough. They may then believe that anything which genuinely sounds different (and probably different from other amps which sound different) is not good enough.NATDBERG said:
To you. That's how you have defined it. High Fidelity to the signal that was decoded by the player. That's not a bad choice, it's a great starting point, but it isn't necessarily my choice. It used to be until I found that strict adherence to the signal does not always result in sonic realism (for me).
Therefore my definition of High Fidelity is fidelity to the original sound, not always to the original signal. If the two coincide, all the better. I don't find that they always do, and I know that I am not alone in this.
I understand your definition, and grant that it's good one, but it's too narrow for me, mostly because it fails too often. Changing an engineer's mind on the subject isn't likely - but perhaps you'll see that there is more than one possible view.
The reason for all this arcane discussion is to counter the SS fanboy argument that tubes do so many things badly, they can't possibly be accurate, thus never Hi-Fi. A lot of the things that tubes can do wrong, just don't matter to the final perception of the sound.
One way of looking at it is that every audio system distorts, for a variety of reasons. Period. And, some types of distortion are easy to "hear past", they don't interfere with the mind's ability, in a stress-free way, to filter out what the musical message is in what you're hearing. Systems that produce more of the "nice" and less of the "irritating" distortion will always be subjectively preferable - but the measurement techniques are too simplistic, too primitive to separate the types ...
Except for the loudspeakers, what other ways do electronic audio components work besides sending electronic signals?
There are many possible views once the electric signal is converted to sound waves by speaker drivers. Until then, measuring and judging the performance of preceding components is rather simple in comparison.
I thought this thread is about the properties of what's referred to as "tube sound". 😕
Pano, if you have experiences with comparing the fidelity levels of amps including tube amp, please share. I would like to read about it.
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