tubes and analog

I am plenty calm Raul, despite your attempts otherwise. And FWIW, my statements are plenty 'fair'... (whatever *that* means :)

I have yet to see any of the solid state that you refer to, having been doing CES and the like since 1989 I've been exposed to a lot of it, and a lot of it has been quite expensive. I also do not have to rely on opinion.

Many transistor units have higher distortion at lower output levels where low level detail exists. Tubes OTOH make vanishingly low distortion at lower levels- so low level detail is not obscured by distortion. This is so easy to demonstrate at almost any cost level that your statement would seem to strain credulity.

Tubes are able to retrieve greater detail than transistors and they sound more relaxed. Once detail is lost it cannot be retrieved downstream. So consider a tube phono section.

Rauliruegas and Opus111, there is nothing misleading about my statement at all and it is very easy to demonstrate at any level of cost. Raul in particular, your statement does not make a lot of sense. I have to assume that you do not know our equipment at all and certainly have not heard it.

Hi Opus111, of course I do have a 'vested' interest, but I also stand behind what I say, IOW I try to practice what I preach FWIW. I hope that's OK :)

Rauliruegas, thanks for your explanation! No worries :)

I think Hagtech stated the matter better than I could. And I agree with him that if you are going to make a solid state phono section that does detail retrieval correctly, it will have to be some sort of zero feedback topology using FET style transistors. They are the only devices (I know of) that have linearity like that of triodes.

I for one would love to not have to work with tubes. High voltages, filament circuits, the production of tubes and the like all make transistors desirable. But so far I have yet in the 45 some odd years since they really started to appear to see them actually bring home the bacon. If they did, there would not be more tube equipment manufacturers here in the US then there was 50 years ago! The market has spoken very clearly to that.

In fact the odd-ordered harmonic generation that is a hallmark of transistors is a feature that runs counter to the rules of human hearing. We all hear the same way in this regard, and is not something that we can change.

The odd-ordered harmonic content we are talking about is used the human ear as loudness/harshness cues and occurs in vanishingly small amounts- hard to measure with conventional test equipment. But our ears are very sensitive to this type of distortion- finely tuned you might say.

Tubes do not make this type of distortion. So- in a phono stage, if you *add* this distortion, it will exist in the system right to the loudspeaker. So the phono section is the place where you really want to use tubes.

Rauliruegas, the last time I auditioned one of your produc ts it blew up too! What a coincidence!

How about you fess up? The fact is you did not audition our gear. This sort of behaviour on your part is what gets people branded as trolls.

tubes are a noisy device " per nature ", tubes designs have higher distortions level than SS or hybrids one, tubes have heavy problems to reproduce accurately both frequency extremes specially the low bass where ( beteen other things ) does not have control over the woofers like the SS topology, tubes are untrusty: time to time ( very short time ) blow-up, tubes are not performance consistent: almost every single day sound different ( many people don't take in count because every day are in touch with their systems )

Rauliruegas, I gotta call you on this one. *None* of the above is true. Tubes are *lower* distortion than transistors, noise is a red herring (either are noisy *or* quiet- you know that), the 'woofer control' comment is right out (mythological) and frankly, dealing with the reliability of transistors in the studio the last few days: give me tubes- at least they can be serviced! If a transistor bites you you're down for the count. And finally your comment about tubes being inconsistent is just wrong. I've had the same tubes in my Neumann U67s for the last 20 years and the mics get a lot of use, often on for days at a time. In the same 20 years the transistors in my Mellotron are toast.

OTOH I find that power tubes have variation- but not day to day. Triodes will have very consistent operation right up the end of their service life, which is often 10,000 hours. Pentodes are more variable, but even they will not be different from one day to the next!

I understand that you may think that you are the exception to all this. That's great! Now put yourself on the other side of that *same* coin and realize that there are the same exceptions in the tube world.

Raulinruegas, I'm not insulting you, but your description of our product just happened to be something that has not been documented in nearly thirty years of business. I had to call you on it plain and simple.

Like anyone else in the business, sure we've had failures. But not 'blowing up' on account of a tube failure! which is the context of your statement. As an OTL manufacturer, we had to face the prior legacy of Futterman et.al. who had convinced the world at that time that OTLs were unreliable. We had created a way to make them pretty well bulletproof, so that a tube failure, speaker short, open input or total overload could not damage the amp.

I'm well-known for doing stunts with the amps at shows- pulling power tubes while the amps are playing, shorting out the output while the volume control is turned up to the limit and other things- things you would expect to damage an amp if you did them.

One time I had a tube arc when I had the speaker terminals shorted during just such a demonstration. No big deal- the amp was playing as if nothing happened when I removed the quarters I was using to short out the speaker terminals.

So you chose to describe the the one thing our amps *don't* do. So of course I had to call you on the carpet. In order for these forums to work you have to stick avoiding misleading comments.

Rauliruegas, you can do better than that! First though you are going to have to figure out what the behavior of our amps actually is during a tube failure. So you have some homework to do. Then maybe you'll be able to create a more convincing story.

Got that right!