I finally got myself a tube amp. Well a hybrid tube amp the nobsound ms 10d mk ii.
I can now hear sounds coming from their distinct places like the vocal from the middle and guitar on the right. Is that what they call sound stage? I feel I am in the venue. I can feel I am surrounded by the music.
I can feel the base is much tighter like into my chest tight. Are these the characteristics of tube amp? I pair it with a set of Polk rti4.
I always have a cheap panasonic HT av receiver. It produce sounds but nothing musical. And pair with a set of kilschp rb28 precessor tower speakers. They have horn tweeters. They were never musical.
So for music, do you always use bookself over floorstanding? I heard bookself has better sound image? What does sound image means?
I can now hear sounds coming from their distinct places like the vocal from the middle and guitar on the right. Is that what they call sound stage? I feel I am in the venue. I can feel I am surrounded by the music.
I can feel the base is much tighter like into my chest tight. Are these the characteristics of tube amp? I pair it with a set of Polk rti4.
I always have a cheap panasonic HT av receiver. It produce sounds but nothing musical. And pair with a set of kilschp rb28 precessor tower speakers. They have horn tweeters. They were never musical.
So for music, do you always use bookself over floorstanding? I heard bookself has better sound image? What does sound image means?
Most people when they compare a valve to a solid state amp are comparing apples to oranges. What I means by that is that the two classes of amps are built to different design philosophies which are imposed on the designer by the active component characteristics.
Listen to a SS amp which has been designed with the same or similar design philosophy to a valve amp (simple low feedback designs) and you will hear almost no difference in the output at the speaker. The main difference will be the damping factor which will always be higher in SSamps.
Listen to something like a JLH, Le Monstre or any of the Nelson Pass First Watts designs and I would challenge you to declare the Valve amps to be intrinsically better in any way.
Shoog
Listen to a SS amp which has been designed with the same or similar design philosophy to a valve amp (simple low feedback designs) and you will hear almost no difference in the output at the speaker. The main difference will be the damping factor which will always be higher in SSamps.
Listen to something like a JLH, Le Monstre or any of the Nelson Pass First Watts designs and I would challenge you to declare the Valve amps to be intrinsically better in any way.
Shoog
erk.
That is not a "tube" amp.
Its an SS amp with a tube effects kit tacked on the front of it.
Anything you are hearing as improvement is psycho-auditory or a very lucky coincidence of matching between this new amp and your speakers.
Probably both.
Glad you like it though. Its nice to have stuff you like the sound of.
Jaycar AA0474 Valve Amplifier
That is not a "tube" amp.
Its an SS amp with a tube effects kit tacked on the front of it.
Anything you are hearing as improvement is psycho-auditory or a very lucky coincidence of matching between this new amp and your speakers.
Probably both.
Glad you like it though. Its nice to have stuff you like the sound of.
Jaycar AA0474 Valve Amplifier
Yes
Well designed ones, yes.
Solid state amps don't have to sound as horrible as the "run of the mill", Big Box amps. It's just that audio deesign doesn't get the emphasis that it used to in EE school. They barely cover the basics, let alone go into detail about sonic performance.
I have a SS design that comes very close,and sounds a helluvalot better than any commercial designs.
Most people when they compare amps, don't do level matching and visual clues blocked.
Classes of amps, do you mean class A, class AB ...etc design?
No i mean Valve amps represent one class and SS represents another.
However the class of operation would certainly be skewed differently between valves and SS and I think that would give the Valves an unfair advantage in comparisons.
Shoog
One can sidestep the issues of the influence of design philosophies, etc., by conducting listening tests along the lines of the Richard Clark Amplifier Challenge. For example, the typically lower damping factor of the tube amplifier can be mocked up for an SS amplifier by adding a series resistor at the output, so that the effective output impedance is increased. Likewise, any fall-off in high frequency response can be mocked up with a suitable RC filter, and so on.
I don't know how rigorous the "amplifier challenge" tests were, but the claim being made is rather a strong one, which deserves to be evaluated seriously, I think. Namely, that people simply cannot tell the difference between tube and SS amplifiers, once the "trivial" issues of output impedance, and possible non-uniform frequency response, are taken care of with simple R and C networks. And also, provided that one amplifier is not distorting excessively. (Some SET amplifiers may have enough distortion that they would be distinguishable on those grounds, I suppose.)
Chris
I mean that it is a trivial matter to downgrade the low output impedance and flat frequency response of the SS amplifier to match those of the tube amplifier, by means of a few resistors and capacitors. At least, to match them sufficiently closely to those of the tube amplifier that no listeners were then able to tell them apart. That, I think, is the claim.
Chris
Apparently not. We have digressed into a deep philosophical discussion that ignores the OP's reality.
I don't see a digression here. The OP mentioned some qualities of the sound he was hearing, and asked if they were characteristic of a tube amplifier. The tests reported in the link given by Evenharmonics in #6 claim to demonstrate that with simple modifications achieved with a very few resistors and capacitors, the sound of an SS amplifier becomes indistinguishable from that of a tube amplifier. That seems to me to be a significant observation, and one that is very much pertinent to the OP's question.
Chris
The OP is using a horrendous cludge that has a chipamp fed by an EL84 via an opamp. There isn't even an HT supply in there. It may sound wonderfully euphonic but you'd need more than a series resistor to get the sound of this unit from a well designed amplifier of any other type.
Hah! That's pretty funny! I confess I hadn't followed the link in post #3. I have to admit that this one probably lies rather outside the scope of the Richard Clark challenge!
Chris
Between valve and transistor, valve is older and inferior technology when it comes to hi-fi sound replay equipment. It was used because that's all they had at the time.
From your standpoint could you tell us the difference in sound of floorstanders and bookshelves ( freestanders) and what is this so called "image" ?
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