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Why the hell are tube amps so expensive?


SuBXeRo

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tubes are wonderful, better yet when used just for mids and tweets with a solid state, high damping factor, amp on the woofer section, especially a DIRECT RADIATOR woofer section. If you truly want the best, you will have a bi-amped (passive or active) hybrid system.
I agree with this. I am active bi-amped with tubes on top and SS below. Besides, any idiot can spec out and buy a SS amp. It takes another level of insanity to mull over, choose and tweak a tube amp. More effort equals more results, right? No satisfaction with plug and play. As the ad on TV used to say "You have to EARN it."

Now lets debate something meaningful, interconnect audio cables.

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What gives?????????????? I know the tubes themselves will vary upon make but the actual design of the amp seems so simple in comparison to a transistor amp. Any thoughts?

It's HI-FI, everything is expensive (if you are doing it right).

Wait, what?

It's more like so: you can spend a bunch of money only to eventually find that you don't have to spend a bunch of money to get good sound.

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The musician is both architect and builder. The recording engineer is something else, maybe more like the guy on the other side of the street running his chainsaw.

I think the problem is more the producer than the engineer. They are usually the ones who shape a given recorded performance.

Bruce

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Wait, what? It's more like so: you can spend a bunch of money only to eventually find that you don't have to spend a bunch of money to get good sound.

So true. The first 95% is pretty easy to do for the experienced audiophile, that last 5%, man, it's a heart breaker.

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What gives?????????????? I know the tubes themselves will vary upon make but the actual design of the amp seems so simple in comparison to a transistor amp. Any thoughts?

It's HI-FI, everything is expensive (if you are doing it right).

Not if you buy used stuff or refurbished, which is tested good twice. It's only expensive when you are chasing the wrong electrons and/or barking up the wrong tree, like speaker cables. PUHLEASE! PT Barnum was right.

Edited by ClaudeJ1
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I don't get the defensive attitude Shakey.

There is NO REASON FOR IT as this is not an assault on you personally and there is no need for the guilt by association type attitude. We ALL KNOW the benefits of tubes, and I really do not think anyone here is trying to say one is better than the other or in fact trying my marginalize or "discount" one or the other... I think some of us are saying there are alternatives.

even PWK has written articles of fondness for SS

I agree. The lack of respect by that poster is getting out if hand. Edited by reference_head
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Those hypex modules are impressive, but certainly not cheap. They're mono locks which means you need two of everything and after converting from Euro to USD it's about $1600 for the amps and power supplies. Then you need cases, wiring, binding posts, etc. well worth it, sure, but not your typical "cheap" class D project.

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The bottlehead stereomour is on my radar at about $800 for the stock 2a3 kit. I'd like to go in 45 configuration, so another $300ish for a fresh pair from Sophia Electric. Blummenstein Audio is a speaker company that partners with bottlehead and sells beautiful bamboo bases for the amp kits. I like the caramel ones.. So there's another $100 (bottlehead will actually reduce their kit price by about $40 if you ask them to keep the stock alder base)

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I don't get the defensive attitude Shakey.

There is NO REASON FOR IT as this is not an assault on you personally and there is no need for the guilt by association type attitude. We ALL KNOW the benefits of tubes, and I really do not think anyone here is trying to say one is better than the other or in fact trying my marginalize or "discount" one or the other... I think some of us are saying there are alternatives.

even PWK has written articles of fondness for SS

I agree. The lack of respect by that poster is getting out if hand.

A little spirited discourse scares a lot of people, I understand.

I have been very respectful in this thread.

Over.

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Don, while I respect your desire to hear what the recording engineer hears, I can't say that I agree with you. So many modern recordings sound like crap because the engineers have put in 10 db of boost at 10 kHz (as one example) that I personally find the sound awful (that thought is shared by many of the guys around here for whom I've had to provide filters to attenuate the highs so they can enjoy the music without the "ear bleed" effect that I've mentioned in other posts.) I don't know anyone who owns equipment with tone controls who doesn't crank the treble way down to make those recordings tolerable. How do you deal with such recordings? I recall a forum member stating a while back that he only buys good quality recordings. That approach is fine, but what about all of the great music out there which is recorded poorly? Anyway, sorry to digress from the original question posted.

Maynard

And besides, there are the early to mid 20th century recordings that were done before the tech got perfected. I still enjoy some of those.

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Are there any tube amp kits that you can buy, and build that are reasonably priced? I think I saw some in the past, but cant quite remember. maybe a tube monoblock, that you can run from the preamp out of the amplifier?

I buy tubes from this place, located in Memphis.

https://www.tubedepot.com/

Look under amp kits.

Besides the Tubes4hifi folks, you can also look at Shannon Parks site. Not full kits, but really nice gear.

http://www.diytube.com/phpBB2/index.php

You didn't mention what you consider reasonably priced... ;)

Bruce

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I think the influence of economies of scale are fairly apparent... but this makes me wonder, what about boutique and niche SS amplifiers.

These do appear to be slightly more expensive than boutique Tube amplifiers... in that, I do not think it's logical to compare small production run tube to mass produced SS.

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Everyone interested in enough to spend thousands of dollars for a home music system (HMS), and then spend hours arguing about it on internet forums, should spend a day with a luthier building a guitar paying special attention to how the maker knows when the instrument sounds right.

Some useful axioms for talking about our home music systems:

1. If it sounds good to you, it sounds good. The reason this is axiomatic is not always obvious as it should be. It means simply that there is no reference or universally agreed right sound. If you were in the business to make rulers, a 12" ruler would be right, when it measures exactly 12" by a universal standard which anyone can use. There is no such reference for a home music system. Making a HMS is like making chicken soup. Lots of recipes, lots of technique, lots of different styles, tastes. You like the one you like, and just because Wolfgang Puck makes it differently doesn't mean much.

2. The input is itself a black box. Not only is there no reference for output of an HMS, there is no reference for the input. We can not look at a CD or an LP and know what the output should be. Worse yet, and this is essential to appreciate, the CD/LP does not contain any particular output as observed by human senses. Worse even yet, you can not take the CD/LP and recreate the inputs which created it.

3. You are the actual sound engineer, not the guy in the studio. He is an intermediary. He is bundling the inputs up onto a convenient distribution mechanism to be sold to the end user. When you get the CD/LP, you finish the job he started by selecting an HMS let this material flow back into acoustic energy, from which it began. You are the important final artist in this chain of events.

When you use a home music system, you are making the music, not 'playing music back.' This is not semantics. Music is an acoustic phenomena only. A sheet of notes is not music. A piece of plastic with dots or grooves is not music. Music is the melodious beautiful sound - the stuff coming out of your speakers. A home music system is like a fancy player piano. You put a 'roll' in and hit the play button and music comes out. Here's where the visit to the luthier comes into play. What's he doing to make the instrument sound 'right?' What tools is he using to tune the final product? How does it compare to what some other luthier might be doing? How do guitarist customers choose which instrument to buy and use?

A successful HMS is a musical instrument. It takes electro-mechanical impressions of some previous musical event and creates a new, original musical event in your room. One that was maybe never heard before by any other human being and may never be heard again. It is not the same one that occurred on the day it was captured and transformed into electro-mechanical storage. But it has the ingredients you can use emulate it.

Not much relevance to your points concerning black boxes vs. wood boxes with strings suspended across a cavity as to the suject of this thread, which is the high price of devices that have a voltage based transfer function.

All aspects of sound REproduction as opposed to sound production are measurable a repeatable. They do not rely on a subjective opinion of a "sensitive" person. Sound reproduction is, in basically a consequence of choice by the reproducer. 90% of the sound that is REproduced is the ROOM. So primarily it is the result of economics of neighborhood and historical construction methods along with "typical" room sizes. The other 10% and only 10%, so arguing about that 10% is what occupies everyone's time. The rest is tweaking to taste based on economics and attitude. All are measurable and repeatable with current technologies. Not matter what choices are made by anyone in the entire chain, the infinite permutations of how sound in air is generated and regenerated in various spaces, whether synthesized, acoustic, or amplified, the end result is nothing more than a personal ILLUSION, period. This is also true when the choice is headphones, where the acoustic space around the listener is not part of the 90% equation.

Edited by ClaudeJ1
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When it comes to boutique amplifiers, the retail price is not a simple derivative of the cost of production. The price can reflect qualities like exclusivity, rarity, celebrity, reviews, and so on. The more commodity-like something becomes, the more its price is based on cost. In the range of amplifiers costing less than a few thousand dollars, the price is mostly commodity-like. When you get way to right on the distribution curve, cost has less impact on retail price.

while I generally agree with everything here... I think the the retail pricing can be generalized as a cost of production because in this realm of market, there is little need to be competitive. it will always be a generalized percentage figure of the production costs.

the only other thing that influences here are intangibles such as reputation and perception of branding.

Edited by Schu
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