SETs vs old SS � Listening experiments

[NOSValves]

This crazy comparison thread is like the ever ready bunny...........

[coda]

subs have their place, but for adding more horsepower, suggest someone might experiment with a tube crossover to dedicate an amp for each driver.

in the same vein, maybe dedicating a 2A3 for the tweeter and midrange, and a 300B on the woofers is something to consider.

[Jeff Matthews]

Somebody care to explain how you can obtain a benefit from bi-amping? I figure it this way (which is probably wrong), but if you have an amp good enough to drive the woofer, mid and tweeter by itself, why would you be doing better to restrict it to only the woofer and get another amp for just the mid-range and tweeter? If you have some amp you think sounds great on the high end, but not on the low end, or vise versa, I can maybe see that.

[coda]

I think it's debatable, but some will claim benefits from bypassing the speaker's crossover system.

[JBryan]

Somebody care to explain how you can obtain a benefit from bi-amping?  I figure it this way (which is probably wrong), but if you have an amp good enough to drive the woofer, mid and tweeter by itself, why would you be doing better to restrict it to only the woofer and get another amp for just the mid-range and tweeter?  If you have some amp you think sounds great on the high end, but not on the low end, or vise versa, I can maybe see that.

Jeff,

You pretty much have a handle on it. My opinion is that the best setup will be the simplest and if one amp can do all the things I'm looking for - I'd be there. Problem is, in my case, its always a compromise - I wanted the finesse and detail of a low-watt SET amp and the speed and bottom-end authority of a digital amp. I had tried several times to bi-amp but wasn't really happy with the results until I used an active xover (another compromise). The active xover enables me to blend different amps more effectively and quickly. The drawback is a more complex setup - more ICs and wire in addition to the xover.

In the end, its entirely up to the listener to determine what he/she wants and how much effort they're willing to put into what, is at best, a compromise. Have fun, Bryan

[Parrot]

subs have their place, but for adding more horsepower, suggest someone might experiment with a tube crossover to dedicate an amp for each driver.

in the same vein, maybe dedicating a 2A3 for the tweeter and midrange, and a 300B on the woofers is something to consider.

Now that's interesting! Here I've been led to believe that 1/3 of a watt for the entire loudspeaker was all that anyone could possibly need, and that most of the time 1/1000 of a watt would suffice.

[coda]

I know that you know

that I know that you know

that less is more

[Parrot]

Except when less is less.

[jacksonbart]

My musical canvas is silence. Is there any way to have less silence?

[coda]

less canvas

[Z4!]

Now that's interesting! Here I've been led to believe that 1/3 of a watt for the entire loudspeaker was all that anyone could possibly need, and that most of the time 1/1000 of a watt would suffice.

Mr. Parrot: I've told you a hundred million thousand times not to exaggerate!! []

Please show us one post that maintains that 1/3 of a watt was all anyone could possibly need.

TIA!

[NOSValves]

I think it's debatable, but some will claim benefits from bypassing the speaker's crossover system.

I think for many it's best they just bypass the speaker all together[]

[NOSValves]

Now that's interesting! Here I've been led to believe that 1/3 of a watt for the entire loudspeaker was all that anyone could possibly need, and that most of the time 1/1000 of a watt would suffice.

Mr. Parrot: I've told you a hundred million thousand times not to exaggerate!! []

Please show us one post that maintains that 1/3 of a watt was all anyone could possibly need.

TIA!

No more an exaggeration then claiming you can shake the pictures off the wall with authorative bass using a 1 watt amp. This stuff goes both ways Parrot is just equalizing the ridicules.

Craig

[Cut-Throat]

Now that's interesting! Here I've been led to believe that 1/3 of a watt for the entire loudspeaker was all that anyone could possibly need, and that most of the time 1/1000 of a watt would suffice.

Mr. Parrot: I've told you a hundred million thousand times not to exaggerate!! []

Please show us one post that maintains that 1/3 of a watt was all anyone could possibly need.

TIA!

No more an exaggeration then claiming you can shack the pictures off the wall with authorative bass using a 1 watt amp. This stuff goes both ways Parrot is just equalizing the ridicules.

Craig

No matter how many times you guys post, there will be plenty of folks trading in their VRDs and other designs for SET Amps. I don't see any going the other way.

[Parrot]

You haven't been paying attention, then.

[Z4!]

Now that's interesting! Here I've been led to believe that 1/3 of a watt for the entire loudspeaker was all that anyone could possibly need, and that most of the time 1/1000 of a watt would suffice.

Mr. Parrot: I've told you a hundred million thousand times not to exaggerate!! []

Please show us one post that maintains that 1/3 of a watt was all anyone could possibly need.

TIA!

No more an exaggeration then claiming you can shack the pictures off the wall with authorative bass using a 1 watt amp. This stuff goes both ways Parrot is just equalizing the ridicules.

Craig

OK, I'll play! Please show me one post where anyone suggested they could shack the pictures off the wall using a 1 watt amp.

Ridicules indeed!

[oldtimer]

Can't we all just get along? Who brought this thread back from the dead anyway? Just in time for Halloween.

[IB Slammin]

I think it's debatable, but some will claim benefits from bypassing the speaker's crossover system.

I think for many it's best they just bypass the speaker all together[]

Craig, LMAO

[IB Slammin]

........" It's the first 100 watts that count" ........ as per BEC []

Terry

[coda]

Tube Hi-Fi

An Anthropological View

Technology changes things.

I vaguely remember my undergrad anthropology class, and a great paper that we had to read. I believe that it was called Steel Axes for Stone Age People, or something similar.

It was one of those sad stories, that anthropology seems to have so

many of. A group of Europeans, with the very best of intentions,

destroyed a thriving, if primitive, culture by giving them 'better'

axes than the crude ones they'd had all along. Problem was, as I

recall, that the stone axes had a great, totemic importance. All power

devolved along lines of who was allowed to possess them, use them, or

loan them out. The steel axes turned everyone into a king, overnight.

The society collapsed. When the Europeans returned, they were amazed to

see how the tribe they'd 'helped' was practically extinct.

Technology changes things.

We gather here today to speak of the output transformer. Every

tube amplifier needed one. It was a huge, heavy, costly, square Thing.

It matched the high impedance of the tubes to the low Z of the

speakers. All the best ones came in sealed, black boxes, potted in

weird-smelling goo, with wires coming out and dark magic inside. There

were tales of strange buildings, far off in the distance, where

sorcerer's apprentices wound them by hand.

Old-timers understood that specs are written as much by the

marketing departments as the engineers. As Paul Klipsch was fond of

saying, "Ho hum; another major breakthrough." Hi-fi had one of these,

real or imaginary, every week. They kept a lot of hobby magazines in

business.

There were super duper FM tuners, such as the almost mythopoeic

Marantz 10B. These had glowing, green oscilloscopes, upon which you

could watch them ****** WQXR from the merest whisper of RF. There were

DC/daylight preamps, with distortion so low it broke the testing

machine. There were record players, though everyone called them

'turntables,' of every shape and size, some delicate and fussy, some

ready for Wil. E. Coyote to drop on the Road Runner. There were the

monthly revolutions in cartridges (which none dared call 'needles') and

tone arms, each one guaranteed to track the dreaded 'Mais Que Nada'

better than the last. There were tape machines, like the Revox, so good

that even studio grunts used them on location.

But

the power amps were different. They had output transformers. Oh sure,

tubes changed on occasion, from triodes to kinkless tetrodes to beam

pentodes to transmitting tubes like 807s, 811As, and the enormous 813s.

Kilowatts were possible with these tubes, and in fact were common in

radio modulators, but the required transformers were heroic. For real,

hi-fi bandwith at these powers, you were talking about a hell of a lot

of iron, copper, and money. There sat that transformer, inert,

immovable, unchanging, massive, daunting. The amp, the modulator, or

whatever, had to be designed around the thing. This was practically a

law of nature.

And so, for hi-fi in the home, the output transformer was like

the stone axe, in more ways than one. It kept engineers honest.

Everything else could, and did, get ever more gimmicky, but there sat

the 90-pound power amp, hidden away as if almost in shame, buzzing and

warming up the room. So it had been since Lee DeForest, and so it would

always be.

This bothered engineers no end. The biggest

problem dated at least as far back as the late 1950s, when AR designed

a smaller woofer.

Now, remember that hi-fi gear came from pro audio. Any real

audio pro knew that all decent speakers used horns, or Helmholtz

resonators, or various ingenious combinations of same, to do sort of

what a transformer did, only acoustically.

Their huge boxes matched the feeble wiggles of the speaker cones to the

big wiggles that made big sound. Three real watts, class-A triode

single-ended watts, could fill a movie theater through one of these

monsters. In your typical home, this stuff didn't even breathe hard.

Problem was that much of it barely fit a home. You could sleep inside

these things. When stereo came in, you needed two of them. Time to

think seriously about the AR woofer, or knocking out a wall.

The AR woofer was an acoustically damped, direct radiator. It

made the speaker wiggle harder, much harder, hard enough to blow out a

match, as the salesmen were quick to do. Once again, Paul Klipsch had

an opinion on the AR-1. He said that anyone could miniaturize a bass

speaker, but not a 32-foot wave length. He was right, but only partly.

The AR-1, and later the AR-3, sounded great. They created a whole

school of audio, The Polite Boston Sound, as contrasted to The Big West

Coast Sound, which stayed with Altecs, JBLs, and, yes, Klipschorns.

But Mother Nature took her due. The ARs, KLHs, and such needed

more watts. Way more watts. Every -3dB needed twice the wattage, and

there were lots of -3dBs. From then on, it was good to have lots and

lots of watts.

This hit the power amp designers dead on. "Watts!" screamed the

speaker people, not to mention the ad departments, "Bring us more

watts!"

Eventually, the engineers came through. They figured out how to

make hi-fi transformers larger, but not too large, without compromising

the sound. McIntosh went to pentafilar winding, and other things that

might have captured souls. It was fortunate that these were in metal

shields that would probably survive space re-entry.

This pact with the Underworld put real juice into

tube amps. All the big stuff went to 40 RMS watts per channel, then 60

or 75. Guitar amps, with their whacko circuit designs, got clear to

100.

This made for some pretty heavy-duty gear. These things were

supermachines, and they still are today. Like the original, big

speakers, they push the limits of what fits in a non-technogeek home.

By the middle 60s, electronics had really gone about as far as

this universe was going to allow. The transducers at either end,

cartridges and speakers, continued to evolve, but everything else was

pretty much in place. They still call this the 'golden age of hi-fi.'

Everyone was making nice gear, much of it in kits or at reasonable

prices, and an awful lot of people made a pretty nice hobby out of it

all. Helped out by the highbrow FM stations of the time, it led a

generation into 'classical' music, modern jazz and finally progressive

rock.

Technology changes things.

Sometimes a great notion. Solid state was one of these. It got

rid of the transformers. A power amp could be an electron hose. Hang an

arc-welder power supply at one end, your low-impedance pass elements in

the middle, and the speakers on the other end. Stick some sound in the

middle, and run for the hills.

It got positively manic. Engineers had new laws of physics.

Mankind had Fire. The number of watts was suddenly unlimited, except by

what speakers could take, and speakers began eating electrons for

lunch. Amp powers went to 150WRMS per channel, then 300, then out of

sight. Your average car boom-box had more watts than a tube-era

football stadium. Rock PAs got so big that they couldn't be fed from

standard, AC mains. Roadies took power panels apart, and tied right

into 220V pole drops. Man moved another step closer to God.

Everyone went number crazy. The magazines had to find new types

of distortion to write about, because IM and THD had gone Heisenberg.

It caused more IM or THD to try and measure either.

Lightning was abroad in the land. The 60s couldn't give power

to the people, but the 70s hi-fi industry could. These were heady

times. The human race was being saved.

So what went wrong? Something certainly did. Within a decade,

we had lost hi-fi. It was gone. At the time, most people blamed that

misunderstood monster, the personal computer, but that's not even

close.

What happened was that, with direct-coupled circuitry, hi-fi

had its steel axe. It lost its paradigm. The center gave way. Social

distortion replaced the electrical kind.

First off, the industry got greedy and tried to push everyone

into four-channel, discrete quad. Someone invented it, it was finally

practical, so why not do it? Audio magazine went positively ballistic over this, month after month.

Unfortunately, the emperor had no clothes. I don't know who the first

guy was who stood up and said that quad sounded like hell, but someone

finally did. He served Humanity more than he will ever know. Mais que

nada.

Debunked, quad blew away faster than a trailer in a hurricane. So did a lot of industry credibility. Audio, once a pretty decent engineering magazine, was bought by some large corporation. That, as they say, was that.

It was straight down from there. Hi-fi, for the most part,

became stereo, as hawked in stores by spiff-point closers who'd sold

used cars the year before. Stereo, ultimately, was absorbed into

consumer electronics, along with everything else. This is when the

hobby magazines moved on, to newer hobbies, including, yes, that

dreaded microcomputer.

Wireheads went on measuring their incredible numbers, but few people

cared any more. It was like getting excited about a toaster oven. Hi-Fi

shows, which had been positively celebratory, died out. Marantz and

McIntosh both dropped their travelling amplifier clinics, where whole

generations of guys had once lugged piles of gear and faced Truth.

As a semiotician, I knew it was over when the ads changed. Hi-fi had

always been an unabashed, snob medium, almost to political

incorrectness. It was the home-electronic version of espresso coffee.

Starting sometime in the eighties, however, we got democracy. Today, we

are constantly reminded how easily any loser with two grand can be a

public nuisance by nightfall. CD players come with DA BIG BASS written all over them. Thump, thump, thump.

With a few ideas left over from quad, The Big West Coast Sound evolved

into consumer audio's current Real Big Thing, the home theaters. These

are an attempt to recreate the movie experience back home. Fuzzy disks

are shown on even fuzzier big-screens, while over-processed surround

sound pummels you from all over the room. It's fun, up to a point,

since being pummeled has its moments. The two problems, as I see them,

are that music doesn't really sound like much on this stuff, minus a

picture to look at, and that they're still in a content-less phase.

They watch Star Wars, Top Gun and Terminator II, again and again. Nope. This is way too L.A. for me.

The Polite Boston Sound had a better fate. It got interesting fast, when it was taken over by bottleheads.

Now, I don't knew who the first neo-tube people were. Perhaps, they

were always there. It's that thing with the emperor's clothes again. At

some point, someone got up and said what everyone was sort of thinking,

that specmanship had led us all down the garden path. It had created a

generation of gear that looked hi-tech, made incredible pictures of

square waves on scope tubes, but actually sounded less listenable than

old tube equipment, THD and all. Soon, thousands of closet doors flew

open. Audio types were dumpster diving all over the place. Just like

that, firebottles were everywhere.

Apparently, a lot of magazine writers and engineers had made a

lot of money burying tube technology forever. Then they had snuck home

and listened to the stuff. They'd spent their salaries on 300Bs.

Nobody's talking, but it had to be that way.

For one thing, it's suspicious that old, glass-audio stuff

never really showed up at garage-sale prices. After all, we hams had

been lucky. A lot of agencies, not to mention other hams, threw tube

radios out as junk. But, except for a vintage, Heath parter I rescued

from a Hollywood trash heap, this never really happened in hi-fi. There

was no $100 MC275 for Hugh, not even outside of L.A..

Modern hi-fi still has two camps, but they're a bit different. Now it's the golden-ears versus the tinkerers.

The golden-ears, aka the audiophiles, have a good attitude. I like

these guys, though sometimes they get a bit too worked up. As in the

fine wine scene, there's almost a race to see who can throw out the

best adjectives.

In my own, deranged experience, I have heard a lot of tubes

sound clean, dirty, screechy, muffled, boomy, thin, and other things

that music sounds like. When I read, however, that some newly excavated

wonderbottle insinuates itself with a wry irony, slushy but at the same

time somehow crystalline, deceptively virginal but with a dominant

streak bordering on fascism, finishing with a psychoactive

post-deconstruced weltanschauung

of expressionistic purity seldom seen upon this Earth, I start

wondering who's been sniffing the getter gas too long. Inspiring as

these neat old firebottles are, they're still just neat old

firebottles.

The tinkerers, the DIY scene, also have an

attitude that I like a lot. They're currently experimenting with some

interesting tubes and circuits. Of course, they also can have their own

excesses. Some of their small companies are lucky that yuppies have

long since disconnected monetary price from value. I mean, the

'high-end' audio scene is fun, and its amazing gear is practically art,

but for me it's not worth a life of debt. I had college for that.

Any hope for the long-term, post-yuppie survival of tube hi-fi is as a

hobby again. The future belongs to the DIY. The idea, as I see it, is

to have fun with this stuff. It's ham radio with better speakers.

After all, that's just what this is. It's a movement. It's the Mister Valve anti-sonic-massacree movement, and you're in it.

original article