So the correct answer is: make a replica of vintage equipment from whatever period you prefer?
If it's from the time when phono cartridges were crystal or ceramic cartridges, you don't even need a reverse RIAA network to make a line input.
If it's from the time when phono cartridges were crystal or ceramic cartridges, you don't even need a reverse RIAA network to make a line input.
To a point, yes.
Talking "nostalgia" is a very vague and diffuse description unless you can define nostalgia of what???
And to be complete it should include period matching Music too.
So yes, for many here in their 60's (+/- 10 years) it could mean 60s 70s high quality tube equipment, think Marantz, HH Scott, Harman Kardon, or speakers like AR, Klipsch, etc.
20/30/40 y.o. ones: gimme a break, get out of here! , you never ever heard those , not even in your youth, because they were not around any more.
Your current "nostalgia" for that sound is fake, an acquired taste (if that much), coming from reading too many "Audio" magazines but much worse, reading so many "audio" pages that you caught an indigestion.
I am 69 and only listened to a couple high quality tube setups in my youth (mid to late 60´s, early 70´s), compared to a lot of US made early SS ones by the great Factories, which were soon replaced from mid 70´s on by Japanese ones ... SS of course.
Any younger and they might also despise and complain about gasoline and diesel fumes and miss carbon fired locomotives and horse dung in the streets (as in: chronologically impossible).
Oh well.
PS: crystal/ceramic pickups were respectively poor/middle class people options, and both could be classified as "scratchy", that´s why cheap amplifiers included in record players (single ECL82 and similar,or dual for Stereo) "Tone" control was the crude single pot "treble cut" only, ugh!!!; higher class listeners used originally "expensive" Magnetic pickups. which also required more complicated and expensive preamps.
My friends in a small rural town in the middle of the Pampas had such record players in their rooms, to listen at Beatles, Rollings, Creedence, Doors, Steppenwolf, etc.
My Father bought for us kids a much envied (in my town, back in the day) Grundig console, large as as a folding bed, including a very good 11 band Radio, tuning bands useless here (he had it specially imported from Germany) including LW, MW, various SW bands (which could pick other Countries at night) and useless for years .... imagine!!: FM!!!!
Which I modded to catch some TV audio ... just to catch "something".
And .... drum roll ..... cartridge was Ceramic 🙁 ... so after sometime I got a new, much better turntable, a Shure magnetic capsule and built an RIAA preamp for it.
SS of course , some kind of Siemens project, using BC109 , go figure.
So for most of those claiming "Tube nostalgia" ..... 🙄
Talking "nostalgia" is a very vague and diffuse description unless you can define nostalgia of what???
And to be complete it should include period matching Music too.
So yes, for many here in their 60's (+/- 10 years) it could mean 60s 70s high quality tube equipment, think Marantz, HH Scott, Harman Kardon, or speakers like AR, Klipsch, etc.
20/30/40 y.o. ones: gimme a break, get out of here! , you never ever heard those , not even in your youth, because they were not around any more.
Your current "nostalgia" for that sound is fake, an acquired taste (if that much), coming from reading too many "Audio" magazines but much worse, reading so many "audio" pages that you caught an indigestion.
I am 69 and only listened to a couple high quality tube setups in my youth (mid to late 60´s, early 70´s), compared to a lot of US made early SS ones by the great Factories, which were soon replaced from mid 70´s on by Japanese ones ... SS of course.
Any younger and they might also despise and complain about gasoline and diesel fumes and miss carbon fired locomotives and horse dung in the streets (as in: chronologically impossible).
Oh well.
PS: crystal/ceramic pickups were respectively poor/middle class people options, and both could be classified as "scratchy", that´s why cheap amplifiers included in record players (single ECL82 and similar,or dual for Stereo) "Tone" control was the crude single pot "treble cut" only, ugh!!!; higher class listeners used originally "expensive" Magnetic pickups. which also required more complicated and expensive preamps.
My friends in a small rural town in the middle of the Pampas had such record players in their rooms, to listen at Beatles, Rollings, Creedence, Doors, Steppenwolf, etc.
My Father bought for us kids a much envied (in my town, back in the day) Grundig console, large as as a folding bed, including a very good 11 band Radio, tuning bands useless here (he had it specially imported from Germany) including LW, MW, various SW bands (which could pick other Countries at night) and useless for years .... imagine!!: FM!!!!
Which I modded to catch some TV audio ... just to catch "something".
And .... drum roll ..... cartridge was Ceramic 🙁 ... so after sometime I got a new, much better turntable, a Shure magnetic capsule and built an RIAA preamp for it.
SS of course , some kind of Siemens project, using BC109 , go figure.
So for most of those claiming "Tube nostalgia" ..... 🙄
I'm a little younger (63) but I had some exposure to a real tube hifi when I was a kid (6 to 10 years old). When my parents bought their dream house in the suburbs, they bought the house (mono) hifi too. It was a really good one -- Stromberg-Carlson integrated amplifier (push pull 6L6s) and a beautiful AM-FM tuner with a big, backlit, glass faceplate, one of those Garrard A record players (I have no idea what kind of cartridge, though), and a big, beige speaker cabinet with a large (12 inch?) Altec woofer and some kind of horn tweeter (probably Altec, but I don't remember). It sounded amazing to me. Big, robust, full bodied, all that good stuff. I listened to the AM Top 40 station playing Motown hits ("I'll Be There" and the like), early Rolling Stones hits ("Honky Tonk Women"), Steppenwolf ("Born To Be Wild"), probably the Doors, plenty of Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, all that good stuff -- and I'm sure plenty of horrid stuff ("Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies was the Number One hit of 1968!). I really loved that thing.
Unfortunately, we kids being kids, that hifi eventually got wrecked. Somebody threw a ball into the faceplate of the tuner, smashing that beautiful glass. Then finally, the 6L6s burned up. We had fallen on harder times by then, and the $100 estimate (I remember the TV repair guy saying it) was too much to pay. I was commanded to pull the amp out of the cabinet and leave it out in the trash. I protested. But eventually I did what I was told, and out it went.
I never had a good stereo as a teenager, because I spent all my money on guitars and guitar amps. I had a Dual turntable (that was my big splurge) but it chewed up all my records. I probably had the tracking force set way too light (remember the Tracking Force Wars?). But my youngest brother had a sweet, quintessentially 1970s setup -- a Marantz (Japanese) solid state integrated amp, a Technics SL23 turntable, and a pair of Dynaco A25 speakers. It sounded quite good, actually.
But I never forgot that Stromberg-Carlson/Altec hifi. Years later, in the late 1980s, I put together a good stereo. I got a pair of Dyna MkIII amps, a Thorens TD145 turntable with a cheap Grado cartridge, and a pair of B&W DM100 speakers (budget bookshelf things). I never had a worthy preamp for it, though. I tried a few, and they were all disappointing. I think I liked the Hafler DH101 best, until I finally got my hands on a Dyna PAS3. Then that was 'modded' into a Van Alstine SuperPAS, and down the rabbit hole I went...
So funny as it may seem, I grew up with tube amps. And now? Believe it or not, there's not a single tube in my stereo, at least for the moment -- and I think I really like it, too.
Unfortunately, we kids being kids, that hifi eventually got wrecked. Somebody threw a ball into the faceplate of the tuner, smashing that beautiful glass. Then finally, the 6L6s burned up. We had fallen on harder times by then, and the $100 estimate (I remember the TV repair guy saying it) was too much to pay. I was commanded to pull the amp out of the cabinet and leave it out in the trash. I protested. But eventually I did what I was told, and out it went.
I never had a good stereo as a teenager, because I spent all my money on guitars and guitar amps. I had a Dual turntable (that was my big splurge) but it chewed up all my records. I probably had the tracking force set way too light (remember the Tracking Force Wars?). But my youngest brother had a sweet, quintessentially 1970s setup -- a Marantz (Japanese) solid state integrated amp, a Technics SL23 turntable, and a pair of Dynaco A25 speakers. It sounded quite good, actually.
But I never forgot that Stromberg-Carlson/Altec hifi. Years later, in the late 1980s, I put together a good stereo. I got a pair of Dyna MkIII amps, a Thorens TD145 turntable with a cheap Grado cartridge, and a pair of B&W DM100 speakers (budget bookshelf things). I never had a worthy preamp for it, though. I tried a few, and they were all disappointing. I think I liked the Hafler DH101 best, until I finally got my hands on a Dyna PAS3. Then that was 'modded' into a Van Alstine SuperPAS, and down the rabbit hole I went...
So funny as it may seem, I grew up with tube amps. And now? Believe it or not, there's not a single tube in my stereo, at least for the moment -- and I think I really like it, too.
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That´s the true setting and background.
And why I often point out that adding a minuscule "tube" link in then chain, specially one designed to be clean and flat (a buffer/line amp) will minimize its already small contribution.
Want significant tube sound? ... get a tube Power Amp (specially a Classic design, bot one with modern frills) to drive your speakers and now we´re talking.
Of course it´s way bigger, heavier, more inconvenient and expensive than a buffer!!!!
But as Personal Trainers say: "no pain no gain!!!"
And why I often point out that adding a minuscule "tube" link in then chain, specially one designed to be clean and flat (a buffer/line amp) will minimize its already small contribution.
Want significant tube sound? ... get a tube Power Amp (specially a Classic design, bot one with modern frills) to drive your speakers and now we´re talking.
Of course it´s way bigger, heavier, more inconvenient and expensive than a buffer!!!!
But as Personal Trainers say: "no pain no gain!!!"
Yea, you are right🙂 Because it is the opposite of what the OP asked for: ”How to build a warm, smooth and sweet tube buffer”
🙂
And to be perfectly honest, well, lets be completely honest. We all know: It takes a certain kind of very, very untalanted, language challanged, fully deaf, painfully unskilled HiFi noob listener and HiFi builder to fully fail in the test: To somewhat understand what the OP is looking for.
🙂🤚
Hey, that might be an amusing tool to have for the ever springing-up objective-subjective debates. Say, some active-stage which exhibits measurements that are totally blameless, yet still sounds awful. Is such an active-stage even possible 🤔 ? Let's leave aside, for the moment, any philosophical assertion that if a stage measures great, then it necessarily MUST sound great. I would, however, like to think that we can agree (no doubt, someone will disagree) that the active-stage holy-grail is one which both measures great, and sounds great. I have no doubt, that there are examples of such on the high-end market.
Subjectivists receive criticism for preferring active-stages which sound great, despite not measuring great, or even measuring average. Of which, there are probably any number of examples on the commercial market. However, I think that it's safe to say, there has never been a commercial product with the goal of measuring great, while sounding not so great (at least, not on purpose 😉 ). It seems to me, that a great measuring, yet bad sounding design (assuming that such a stage is possible 😱 ) might make for an interesting object of discussion for the pure objectivist to address, and if not possible, that to make an interesting topic for the pure subjectivist to address.
I'm only speaking my curiosity out loud, as I don't really suppose anyone might actually want to engage in such a 'research' oriented task. No doubt, we've all got much more interesting things to do with our time, effort and money. Your quoted statement above just got me thinking about it a bit. 🤓
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No. Subjectivist receive criticism for not understanding that their claim that something sounds great is only subjective.
Okay, that's fair, to those that don't understand that. Which is hardly all, or even the majority, I would suggest.
Your claim that "Subjectivists receive criticism for preferring active-stages which sound great" suggests that you may still have trouble understanding that.
Well, I think we can agree on one thing. One of us is having trouble understanding what the other is saying.
I freely admit I want a effects box that contains pleasing distortions or artifacts to my subjective ears. Of course, there's at least one objective factor is noise. I want an effects box with no noticeable noise. The problem with many magazines of the subjective camp is that they're not honest about what they like and would write pages of pornographic prose describing their listening experiences but keep harping on "neutrality" or "the absolute sound." They sound like a religious cult more than anything. I'd like to see more people simply using objective means to achieve subjective goal without having to apologize for it. For example, I have used a vari-mu tube compressor as a preamp before and it sounded great to me, despite the criticism of remote cut-off tubes being non-linear. Whatever works!
Clearly it was written tongue-in-cheek.
Something which you obviously can´t "get" 😉
You must be
in social interaction, specially Forumspeak not to understand that.
What most audiophiles fail to admit is that they need, like and make use of various forms of compression and compressors. The riaa-anti-riaa algorithm is working on the same principles as dbx, highcom and dolby to some extent while their beloved vinyl records that they strive to reproduce as clean and higher in dynamics with their fancy circuits are just compressed recordings as well as their nab recorded tapes.
Phono preamps sound better when they make use of compression techniques...
Well...they are called companding expanding techniques, but in short they are just part of the bigger 100 years compression war.
Then it can´t sound awful ... or good ... it does not have sound of its own.
What colour is transparent glass?
What taste does distilled water have?
Same thing.
Of you don´t like a scene seen through you transparent window, blame the scene, not the transparent glass.
again, "no own sound"
can´t repeat same thing 5 times.
Oh well.
Jey Dee said:
You mean like Yngwie Malmsteen?
These are ALL TUBE AMPLIFIERS end to end (not some puny buffer between digital mountains)
These DO alter sound, in a pleasing way, they are DESIGNED for that, not puny buffers which are designed flat and clean. 🙂
You mean like Yngwie Malmsteen?
These are ALL TUBE AMPLIFIERS end to end (not some puny buffer between digital mountains)
These DO alter sound, in a pleasing way, they are DESIGNED for that, not puny buffers which are designed flat and clean. 🙂