Class-A tube amps deprecated in the light of global warming?

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I was watching a guy rebuilding a classic car on satellite TV the other day, and I really wanted that car, and then he let it drop that the fuel consumption was 22mpg, and all of a sudden I didn't want the car so much.

I was thinking about designing and building a class-A tube amp for a bit of fun. Then I thought, is this really a cool thing to do? Unleash another one of these? They're really wasteful. Only on a small scale, but wasteful all the same.

Probably not, actually.

w
 
The powers that be seem to have set the prices pretty constant energy wise between propane, electricity, natural gas and oil for heat. If you have a powerful class-A tube amp running in your living room in the winter, this will add needed heat to the house the same as the same watts being used up in a radiant space heater and is a lot more enjoyable at the same time.

In the summer if you are running a high heat producing tube amp in your home and also running air conditioning to cancel out the heat produced, then you are in a situation of inefficient energy consumption. For hot summer use get a sand amp if you are on a budget.
 
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wakibaki said:
I was watching a guy rebuilding a classic car on satellite TV the other day, and I really wanted that car, and then he let it drop that the fuel consumption was 22mpg, and all of a sudden I didn't want the car so much.
Since when is 22 mpg bad? I'm going to get an RX-7 which does 17 mpg in the city.

They're really wasteful. Only on a small scale, but wasteful all the same.
But dude! Scale is exactly what matters. Consider even an efficient car--it still burns a gallon in not that much distance. And the energy in that gallon is about 40 kW/h--you'd have to run two class A amplifier drawing each 200 W from the mains for 1000 hours to use comparable energy. Now what's worth it to you more--go once 60 miles in an efficient car, or listen to a cumulative time of 1000 hours of quality musical reproduction?
 
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Accelerating expansion means overall there won't be a heat death of maximal entropy, and the universe will end up inhomogeneous (after all, any smoothing effects are limited by c, whereas expansion is not).
On the other hand, one does not get to see this benefit in one's local Hubble volume.
 
SY said:
You're also contributing to the heat death of the Universe. Conversion of coal to electricity, then the electricity to heat, increases entropy.

We're not good Citizens of the Galaxy.


Sy,
You crack me up. :yes: We are both old enough to remember the global cooling "crisis" in the early '70s. We did such a good job of prevent a global catastrophy on that one that we overshot the "perfect" median value temperature.
Hey, how about the "ozone" layer being destroyed and us all getting skin cancer by the age of 30? Another crisis diverted. Whew.
Aids is a terrible thing, but it didn't turn out to be the "one in three" killler as professed by the media.
So much BS slung our way, ya think we would have learned by now. But agendas have their own lifespan, and we can only hope this one dies an early death.
No mention in the media of the hundreds of scientists in NY last week who have evidence of the global warming hoax.....hmmm, I wonder why? These scientists were from Harvard and many EU countries, some very well educated folks. link
Did you know that the meteroligist that started the Weather Channel is advocating sueing Al Gore for selling useless carbon credits? link

My wife came up with "Diet" credits.....we can eat anything we want and still loose weight if we just pay skinny people for our endulgencees. :smash:

Cripes, I wasn't gonna go off like this....sorry,
Ron
 
gootee said:
Good one.

Personally, I'd worry more about things like gamma bursts. I've heard that they can instantly sterilize entire galaxies. Forget about greenhouse gases and ozone. We need MUCH more LEAD in the air. :)


If GRB`s were home theater speakers they could definitely be marketed as `Big Bang in a Box`! Fortunately it appears GRB`s are a temporally long distant (very early universe) phenomenon.
 
7n7is said:
You could rig up an exercycle with a used alternator and inverter system and generate the electricity yourself. Food, which is the fuel of your energy generation, is a renewable resource, so your electricity generation should be also.


How can I know that you do not own a tube based stereo SET class-A amp, not even a 3 watt per channel one. :D

That would draw 100-120 watts from the wall socket. Making that with a stationary bicycle is hard work for more than a minute or so. You would have to be in good shape. :smash:
 
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Renron said:
No mention in the media of the hundreds of scientists in NY last week who have evidence of the global warming hoax.....hmmm, I wonder why?
Huh? He was talking about entropy, not global warming. Though you can argue that global warming is a hoax, you can't possibly argue against the rise of entropy that guarantees that life in any part of the universe will eventually be impossible, because increase of entropy is a fundamental law of physics. That you would confuse the two things betrays ignorance of basic physics.
 
re:entropy

The Pentagon only wants its enemies to suffer a heat death, not the part of the universe which is the United States of America. To make this happen faster they now have a new heat ray-gun weapon. I wish I had one of these today after that huge snowstorm to blast a hole lengthwise down my driveway!



http://www.google.com/search?source...WN_enCA257CA257&q=new+pentagon+ray+gun+weapon
 

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abzug said:

Huh? He was talking about entropy, not global warming. Though you can argue that global warming is a hoax, you can't possibly argue against the rise of entropy that guarantees that life in any part of the universe will eventually be impossible, because increase of entropy is a fundamental law of physics. That you would confuse the two things betrays ignorance of basic physics.

To be fair, I don't think Renron was confusing the two at all. He was just off on a separate rant about the 'mainstream' media promoting junk science whenever it meets the needs of their current agenda. And 'global warming' is in the title of this thread. Granted, it sounds like he also thought Sy was being sarcastic or something like that, and was probably trying to lump Sy's entropy point in with the junk science media darlings from the past, that he mentioned. But by the time he got to global warming, he was already well off onto the separate media rant.
 
Re: re:entropy

rcavictim said:
The Pentagon only wants its enemies to suffer a heat death, not the part of the universe which is the United States of America. To make this happen faster they now have a new heat ray-gun weapon. I wish I had one of these today after that huge snowstorm to blast a hole lengthwise down my driveway!



http://www.google.com/search?source...WN_enCA257CA257&q=new+pentagon+ray+gun+weapon


Huh? At the the link you gave, the headlines are screaming that it's a NON-LETHAL 'weapon'.

Or were you only trying to tie into the entropy/'heat death' theme?

I'm sorry. I hope that I am wrong. But if your intent was also to stage a sort-of 'Pentagon put-down', or to make a political statement promoting a negative attitude toward the U.S. Military, then that makes me uncomfortable, while also leaving me unable to either debate or attack without breaking the rules of this forum. As I said, I hope that I am wrong about your intent. But I think that even just the appearance of impropriety is inappropriate, here, in cases like this. (And I noticed that this is the second thread I've been involved in, where you posted the same weapon-system photo with a link to political 'news' stories.)

On the other hand, if you are merely enamored by cool weapon systems, then that might explain it, and would be fine with me.
 
abzug said:

Though you can argue that global warming is a hoax, you can't possibly argue against the rise of entropy that guarantees that life in any part of the universe will eventually be impossible, because increase of entropy is a fundamental law of physics.

Let's see... What are the three laws of thermodynamics, again? Oh yeah, now I remember:

- You can't win.

- You can't break even.

- You can't get out of the game.

:)
 
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