Malcolm Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Tubes are better because they look cool, particulary the old McIntosh amps with the big blue meters! And, they instantly identify you as an "audiophile!" Fact is, you can get good sound out of well designed tube or solid state gear. And all audio systems add siginificant distortion to the signal. I am including the listening room and speakers in the system as well as amps, etc. In the end, the decision on what gear to use comes down to what kind of distortion sounds best to you. You are not going to hear precisely what the recording engineer heard, much less the original performance. If you are lucky, you will achieve something reasonably close and enjoyable. In my case, I have gone with solid state just because I do not want to deal with tube rolling. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cut-Throat Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Sorry Malcom, I own Solid State, Push-Pull Tubes, Hybrid tubes and SET Tube Amps. All of the tube amps do things that the solid state amps cannot do in terms of listening enjoyment. These are the facts and if you ever care to spend a weekend with a good tube amp and listen to them music carefully, there will be no going back for you. Tube rolling is not a hassle, not mandatory, and is basically pure fun! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leok Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 I listen at lower levels than most people, I think, but I can't imagine sitting in a room with two speakers blasting at around 100dB. That's a Watt for most speakers people are talking about on this forum. Also, the stuff that sounds distorted is not as much the fundamentals as the harmonics, and they are way down in power. Ambient sounds, those that give us spacial information are much much lower. Detail and spacial information are two of the things people begin to notice when the start using tubes with Klipsch speakers. 99dB RF-7 .. let me see. I was using the old 1Watt (not 2.83Vrms which is becomming common) 2.83Vrms into 8 Ohms delivers 1 Watt to that 8 Ohms. 2.00Vrms into 4 Ohms delivers 1 Watt to that 4 Ohms. For a 3dB decrease in amplitude, half the power or, since power = V squared / 2, divide the voltage by the square root of two. Notice that the voltage to deliver 1 Watt into 4 Ohms is the voltage to deliver 1 Watt into 8 Ohms divided by the square root of two. Well, that's like the taps on a tube amp output transformer. The voltage on the 4 Ohm tap is 1 over the square root of two times the voltage on the 8 Ohm tap. If I adjust the gain on a tube amp to give me what it thinks should be 1Watt (of voltage), and connect the RF-7 across the 4 Ohm tap it will be 3dB softer than if I connect it to the 8 Ohm tap. Meanwhile, since the amp assumes I know what I'm doing, it continues to believe it's putting 1 watt into something, in both cases. The reason I was doing all of this was to figure out whether or not I could get enough gain, without using a preamp, from any of several SET designs that have only one gain stage. I decided I couldn't and went with the Moondog. Isn't electricity fun? leok Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deang Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Is Vrms the output voltage of the transformer -- or the input voltage from the source? Or neither. My, I'm not very good at this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leok Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 deang, By Vrms I mead "Volts root mean squared." It's a way to measure varying voltages (sine waves, audio waveforms, etc. .. not DC) so that it can be used to calculate things like power. Actual AC Volts peak to peak is over 2x the rms number for a sine wave. The particular voltages I was refering to were only those voltages that appear on the speaker output terminals. leok Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malcolm Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Cut-Throat FWIW I've had many hours of pleasure listening to some very good tube amps over the last 30 years, both my own and those of friends. I've also had many hours of pleasure listening to some very good solid state gear over the same time period. I have seen the good and the bad in both technologies. You obviously have a different reality that I. Enjoy it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deang Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Sometimes I wonder if maybe the more obnoxious and unforgiving the recordings, the more one might be inclined to enjoy tubes, especialy in the horn arena. I do all pop, rock, and metal, and having owned some very fine solid state gear -- I find my material more listenable and enjoyable with tube gear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artto Posted December 3, 2002 Share Posted December 3, 2002 True Dean. I was pondering the same thing regarding sensitivity. Its a relationship ratio between input signal & output gain. The 4 ohm speaker may provide you with more power out of a direct coupled SS amp. But that has nothing to do with the amp's "sensitivity". Its just a simple 1 volt in, 3 volts out kinda thing (thats why we use the term "gain" instead of volume). & with tube amps that have output transformers (as most do), it can actually get a little more complicated. (see Klipsch Dope From Hope Vol. 11, No.1, March 1971 written by the man himself) (sorry, I don't have time to post the whole thing right now.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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