Now *that* was a sensible post (IMO, of course).
I like tube amps, because for the money (and parts) I have, I can build one to make sounds that I find agreeable.
I have tried to find an equally agreeable 'daily driver' solid state amp that I could afford. BUt I have yet to find it.
I do have an ugly Panasonic receiver that has really surprised me with how pleasant it sounds. I use that to play movies, TV and the occasional CD or SACD, especially in summer when it's too hot to light up the tube setup. That works fine for digital sources, but its analog inputs sound *horrible* for some reason. I don't know why.
Anyway, it sounds like we can agree that hi-fi is so miserable at reproducing a real-life acoustical event that there is a definite 'why bother?' factor involved. In my limited experience, it takes so much time, money and space to make a 'real' sounding system that I know I'll never get close. But I can certainly put together a pleasant sounding system. And strangely enough, the most pleasant systems I've heard have had vacuum tubes in them. However, some of the absolutely worst systems I've heard have also had vacuum tubes in them.
I don't think it's a tubes vs. transistors thing.
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PS -- I'm using a (gasp, horrors) solid state RIAA preamp... and liking it!
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I like tube amps, because for the money (and parts) I have, I can build one to make sounds that I find agreeable.
I have tried to find an equally agreeable 'daily driver' solid state amp that I could afford. BUt I have yet to find it.
I do have an ugly Panasonic receiver that has really surprised me with how pleasant it sounds. I use that to play movies, TV and the occasional CD or SACD, especially in summer when it's too hot to light up the tube setup. That works fine for digital sources, but its analog inputs sound *horrible* for some reason. I don't know why.
Anyway, it sounds like we can agree that hi-fi is so miserable at reproducing a real-life acoustical event that there is a definite 'why bother?' factor involved. In my limited experience, it takes so much time, money and space to make a 'real' sounding system that I know I'll never get close. But I can certainly put together a pleasant sounding system. And strangely enough, the most pleasant systems I've heard have had vacuum tubes in them. However, some of the absolutely worst systems I've heard have also had vacuum tubes in them.
I don't think it's a tubes vs. transistors thing.
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PS -- I'm using a (gasp, horrors) solid state RIAA preamp... and liking it!
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Soundsatge....try being the guy pushing the xylophone around the football field in the middle of the drum line while your daughter plays it during marching band practice.......sitting in the middle of the crowd on BYOD night at a local club. BYOD = Bring Your Own Drum.
No you don't get that sound out of a pair wooden boxes.
My daughter played, and taught drums, keyboards and assorted percussion instruments for several years. I still have the drum set and keyboard. There were always people at our house armed with musical weapons. I made guitar amps for many of them, and I spent a lot of those years trying to record and successfully recreate those sounds. I had a TEAC 3440 4 track analog recorder, and a 16/44 digital system. 16/44 was state of the art then.
I learned a lot. From simple things, like absolute phase means a lot with drums. You want the speaker cone moving toward you when the mallet hits the kick drum, to the obvious, like NEVER put an SM57 INSIDE the bass drum.
I built one with a chip I got from the TI rep several years ago. I put it INSIDE the turntable and liked it too. It was way quieter and smaller than my tube phono stage.
I packed up the TT in Florida two years ago, and two moves later, to my dismay the phono stage wasn't there when I just unpacked it. I must have removed it and its in one of the many boxes along with a dozen other things I can't find.
Well, you shouldn't be playing records either, cause they are obsolete, just like tubes.😉
jeff
If THD is inaudible level, why we care about it?
THD is measurement to indicate how accurate output compare to input. Of course if other aspect is equal like slew rate, S/N ratio, damping factor, etc.
But if THD is audible, if the number is same it can sound different, because harmonic profile is different.
I was thinking about 'soundstage' and reproduced sound...
I've heard some really incredibly good playback systems. One was when I was fortunate enough to be recorded by Mark Levinson at his place back when he was doing Cello (I was accompanying a singer). He recorded us direct-to-DAT (that was a thing back then). I remember a pair of gargantuan amplifiers on the floor with heatsink fins all around. There was a literal wall of electrostatic panel speakers. We were only a vocal-guitar duo, so it wasn't the be all-end all resolution test, but the playback sounded really damn close to what we sounded like. That was all solid-state stuff, of course.
I remember thinking that the sound was really quite life-like, but that there was a vague 'electronic edge' to the sound that isn't there in real life. Even though the playback was extremely clean, to the point of 'Wow, that sounds real,' it still wouldn't completely fool anybody. I'm wondering if that electronic edge is an artifact of the recording practice, of microphones.
If a certain 'electrical sound' is imparted by the microphone, then the most accurate amplifiers and speakers will accurately depict that artifact. Could it be that I've been blaming the playback system for something that's inherent in all recordings?
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I've heard some really incredibly good playback systems. One was when I was fortunate enough to be recorded by Mark Levinson at his place back when he was doing Cello (I was accompanying a singer). He recorded us direct-to-DAT (that was a thing back then). I remember a pair of gargantuan amplifiers on the floor with heatsink fins all around. There was a literal wall of electrostatic panel speakers. We were only a vocal-guitar duo, so it wasn't the be all-end all resolution test, but the playback sounded really damn close to what we sounded like. That was all solid-state stuff, of course.
I remember thinking that the sound was really quite life-like, but that there was a vague 'electronic edge' to the sound that isn't there in real life. Even though the playback was extremely clean, to the point of 'Wow, that sounds real,' it still wouldn't completely fool anybody. I'm wondering if that electronic edge is an artifact of the recording practice, of microphones.
If a certain 'electrical sound' is imparted by the microphone, then the most accurate amplifiers and speakers will accurately depict that artifact. Could it be that I've been blaming the playback system for something that's inherent in all recordings?
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Speakers and room acoustics. The rest are easy to achieve reference quality.
After getting good speakers and room acoustics, if you want to pursuit the sound you like, choose the music album carefully. DAC, preamp or amps are not the area you want to look into for improvement unless they are defective or incompetently designed in which case you shouldn't have purchased from the first place.
Just curious, which one was this best system you are referring to and are you saying that after listening to it?
In the sense of being able to be fooled that there's a live guitar there? Nope, fatal.
Try this: have a guitarist play in the room with you, then switch to a recording of the guitarist. THAT is the relevant experiment, and one I've done a few hundred times.
Both of you are close in what you are saying, not arguing on the main point but on degree.
I have done that test many times too, suggest that an intermediate position could be: "if the program origin is kept simple, it can be reasonably close, and that's the best that can be achieved".
In Sy's experiment (which I have also done a few times), doing the recording, moving around the performer, in different parts of the room, of course adds a ton of extra subtle details which are lost if using fixed position microphones.
It also includes being at different distance ( and moving!!!! ) relative to walls, so no playback a few minutes after recording will achieve same richness of detail.
So that is physically impossible to capture and later to reproduce through 2 "wooden boxes" , "placed somewhere", but I have made 2 similar but simplified experiments:
1) I recorded a guitar player from 3 meters away (~10 Feet) with a pair of microphones (tried different configurations) , again direct to DAT (I guess now I'm showing my age 😉 ) .
Then put a pair speakers to both sides of where he stood originally, I sat 4 meters away ( don't ask me why, this needed a somewhat increased distance than the original recording one, *maybe* because of the greater playback speakers spread) , and in a darkened room "the player was there" .
Notice that I tried to listen, to the best of my efforts, "the same way that microphones had listened".
2) I didn't find the room not being specially conditioned a problem (after all I wanted a "live" type sound, not dead acoustics "Studio" type).
Worst case, if I recorded in "room A" (so its "signature" got recorded too) and then played in "room B" , no big deal, it sounded like the player was now in Room B , if that makes any sense to you.
In a nutshell, in my opinion playback systems are in general very limited, not only by themselves but also by how the program was created, but on acoustically simple cases, unprocessed, they can come close.
That's why I also abhor of many "processors" which modify the program moving it further away from Reality ... even if what the "processor" does tastes sweeter than original or whatever.
Include Tube amps into the Processor category. 😉
Which by the way is agreed and proudly touted even by tubeheads themselves 😉
PS: as a side note, I fully agree with the "listening outside the room" effect.
Happens to me all the time: I go to see/work with a band playing live, when I approach the Club/Stadium they sound *very* good from outside, in a Stadium even from 1 block away ... and getting in is dissapointing.
Often a way too loud, rumbling, distorted , full of bad echoes mess.
Oh well.
I have done that test many times too, suggest that an intermediate position could be: "if the program origin is kept simple, it can be reasonably close, and that's the best that can be achieved".
In Sy's experiment (which I have also done a few times), doing the recording, moving around the performer, in different parts of the room, of course adds a ton of extra subtle details which are lost if using fixed position microphones.
It also includes being at different distance ( and moving!!!! ) relative to walls, so no playback a few minutes after recording will achieve same richness of detail.
So that is physically impossible to capture and later to reproduce through 2 "wooden boxes" , "placed somewhere", but I have made 2 similar but simplified experiments:
1) I recorded a guitar player from 3 meters away (~10 Feet) with a pair of microphones (tried different configurations) , again direct to DAT (I guess now I'm showing my age 😉 ) .
Then put a pair speakers to both sides of where he stood originally, I sat 4 meters away ( don't ask me why, this needed a somewhat increased distance than the original recording one, *maybe* because of the greater playback speakers spread) , and in a darkened room "the player was there" .
Notice that I tried to listen, to the best of my efforts, "the same way that microphones had listened".
2) I didn't find the room not being specially conditioned a problem (after all I wanted a "live" type sound, not dead acoustics "Studio" type).
Worst case, if I recorded in "room A" (so its "signature" got recorded too) and then played in "room B" , no big deal, it sounded like the player was now in Room B , if that makes any sense to you.
In a nutshell, in my opinion playback systems are in general very limited, not only by themselves but also by how the program was created, but on acoustically simple cases, unprocessed, they can come close.
That's why I also abhor of many "processors" which modify the program moving it further away from Reality ... even if what the "processor" does tastes sweeter than original or whatever.
Include Tube amps into the Processor category. 😉
Which by the way is agreed and proudly touted even by tubeheads themselves 😉
PS: as a side note, I fully agree with the "listening outside the room" effect.
Happens to me all the time: I go to see/work with a band playing live, when I approach the Club/Stadium they sound *very* good from outside, in a Stadium even from 1 block away ... and getting in is dissapointing.
Often a way too loud, rumbling, distorted , full of bad echoes mess.
Oh well.
Sorry about my incomplete description of the "outside of room" test. I assumed that you would get the comparison idea. Yes, it would need to be compared to the reference sound to be able to tell how the recorded version would sound. The recording would have to be done in anechoic condition (room or outside). The reason for listening outside of the room is to lessen the room interaction and to shield the view.
Live vs recorded sound comparisons have been done for many decades.
Olive's bottom line was that, indeed, speakers aren't reproducing the actual live sound, but that non-auditory means (showmanship, for example) can fool listeners. That's not pertinent to the issue of having an auditory illusion in the absence of non-auditory stimuli.
Evaluation can be made "modular", as long as the relationship between modules are clearly understood (such as matching impedance, frequency dependence, etc.) But I'm not saying that it is fully 100% possible to understand the relationship but...
Incorrect. MOS's in those days (Vietnam era) were two digits and a letter, followed by two more digits that indicated grade, if memory serves.
I actually forgot what my MOS was, but was reminded of what it was after I did some googling. 5 characters, the last two of which were 20.
The basic job has had a goodly number of different MOSs over the 50 or so years that the Hawk system was active. (!!!) Of course the system morphed many times and the AN/MPQ 39 itself came and went.
It seems to me that the MOS system was changed a year or two before I joined and it no doubt was changed many times more since. I seem to recall that 221 was from the MOS system previous to the one I was in, but that is one heck of a vague memory.
In our world "MOS" has a totally different meaning, and is the polar opposite of ABX.
Being a totally subjective test method it is highly dependent on the test subjects used, and a contributor to the demise of the Nextel phone network.
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