6 ms·

The age old question: besides the obvious aesthetic attractiveness, is there really any kind of objective advantages to tube-based audio amps as opposed to soli

The age old question: besides the obvious aesthetic attractiveness, is there really any kind of objective advantages to tube-based audio amps as opposed to solid-state semiconductor based ones?

soulofmischief 7y ago
Objectively speaking, if the subjective enjoyment of your music is generally increased, then that's a net positive. So it at least depends on the target audience.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  If the target audience is over 35 than chances are their wallets are fat but their ears are already shot. That won't stop them from blowing a lot of money on stuff that doesn't make a difference at all (either measurably or subjectively) but if it makes someone feel better they should be free to waste their money as they see fit.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Ha, yeah there's a lot of snake oil in the business. However, there is definitely a difference in sound, however subtle to some, between most tube and solid state amplifiers when it comes to recording music, as musicians tend to try to draw out certain sounds that are a consequence of the design of the amplifier, whether by overdriving the input or exploiting analog flaws, etc. Even when comparing just tube or solid state amps, there can be a lot of variance between them. This doesn't really apply to consumer-grade amplifiers where the goal is perfect sound reproduction. A good tube amp and a good solid-state amp shouldn't sound different to an untrained ear. But amplifiers used in production often try to differentiate themselves in some way sonically.
- michaelt 7y ago
  What if I'm balancing an increase enjoyment from feeling I've got better sound against a decrease in enjoyment from feeling I've being taken for a fool by snake oil salesmen?
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Refer to my response to Jacques below.
sound1 7y ago
In audio most objectivists believe that currently known measurements (frequency response, power handling abilities, THD, PSSR, other non linear distortions, noise floor, etc.) can 100% conclusively define subjective sound. But then on the flip side there are very reputable people (eg. Paul McGowan from PS audio) agree that we may not have figured out all measurements necessary to nail down subjective audio quality. It is upto the ears of the listeners and their exposure to super high end audio to decide whether that is true. I fall in the camp that thinks we haven't fully figured out what conclusively decides subjective sound quality. It makes things much more interesting and open to more research to settle debates on solid state vs tube, sigma-delta vs r2r dacs, full range driver vs other speaker configurations, cables/interconnects/power-cords matter or not and things like that). Some interesting links (I don't endorse what these guys are saying but find them VERY interesting): About DACs: http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8Mn5PrnZV-k http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8Mn5PrnZV-k About whether audio power cables make a difference (Ask Paul from PS audio): http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8QuToO9JUfw http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8QuToO9JUfw
- patentatt 7y ago
  High end equipment makers have a vested interest in promoting pseudo science because it duped people into spending $5k for a DAC (e.g., PS Audio). Audio frequency range electrical engineering is very well understood and rigorously defined. The only extent to which there is an ‘x’ factor not covered by the legit engineering is that human perception does play a role in, well, human perception. So if you tell someone that this piece of equipment cost more than a car, people will genuinely believe it does sound better. Not too dissimilar from the very real placebo effect in medicine.
  - avip 7y ago
    Anecdotally, I was recently listening to music in some audiophile house, streaming from ~15K$ eq. It wasn't even close to anything I've heard before, other than live music (in something like a jazz club, not a rock concert). Profound quality. I'm sure it's overpriced but man - if I had the money I would replicate his setup without a thought.
squarefoot 7y ago
Technically speaking there is zero advantage in using tubes instead of solid state when the amp is driven below distortion, that is for listening to music at normal level, and anyone claiming they can hear the difference between a decent 100 bucks class D amp and the most expensive tube amp in the galaxy is lying (probably also to themselves if they bought the latter). However, when tubes are driven to distortion, the waveform is clipped in a much gentler way compared to what is produced by solid state parts, so in a Hi Fi amp those high power peaks would indeed sound a lot cleaner, and in a guitar amp where distortion is looked for by design, using tubes would would produce a much nicer clipped sound, which is even more audible when playing chords. In HiFi amps the problem can be easily solved by designing (or buying) for more power than what is needed, so that the headroom reserve will be used to cope with those peaks without getting into clipping, while using tubes for guitar amps apparently still makes sense. Technology however has progressed a lot since the old days, most parts have become a lot cheaper, and even without resorting to digital manipulation todays solid state pure analog guitar amps can sound great without using tubes. One important point though: when making guitar amps with newer technologies such as class D, we must redesign everything so that the amp -I mean the power module- will never clip; no matter what we throw at the amplifier main input, the power module must never be driven into distortion because class D distortion is plain awful. That requires a lot of redesign: no more clipping tubes, coils driven into saturation, purposely weak designed power supplies etc, but simply speaking we distort before and keep the level put in order not to distort after. This makes things even more interesting because one builds the guitar sound much before it gets to the final stages, the only further contribution to the sound being the speaker and the cabinet, not the amp module.
mickael-kerjean 7y ago
Roughly speaking, tube amplifier goes in distortion adding pair harmonics when the solid state add odds ones. Odds harmonics aren't nice to the ear (see by yourself by listening to a Sawtooth wave) while even ones are much more flattering (see by yourself by listening to a triangle wave). This distortion relates to the entire theory that's behind the creation of chords and also to psychoacoustics.
- mrob 7y ago
  Both square and triangle waves contain only odd harmonics, with the high harmonics of the triangle wave rolling off faster. The sawtooth wave contains both odd and even harmonics. You can't have a wave with pure even harmonics because the fundamental is counted as an odd harmonic. If you half-wave rectify a sine wave you get only even harmonics above the fundamental, but to my ears this just sounds like two separate tones: the sine fundamental and a separate higher pitched odd-harmonic wave.
analog31 7y ago
My rule is: If it's real, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured, then it can be reproduced in solid state circuitry, perhaps using digital techniques if necessary. With that said, whether anybody is actually doing so satisfactorily is an open question. Actual test data for things like musical instrument amplifiers is remarkably sparse. And I won't begrudge anybody the pleasure of owning or building historic circuits.
- isolli 7y ago
  You will be very interested in the Carver challenge [0]. In 1985, Bob Carver challenged the Stereophile magazine by claiming that he could perfectly reproduce the sound of any amplifier they chose by tweaking one of his (solid-state) amplifiers. They took him up with a high-end tube amplifier, and he won. Note that he did not use measurements but a brute-force approach of feeding the difference in output signal of both amplifiers to a speaker, and listening for (and manually correcting) any residual output. https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge
mhh__ 7y ago
Not really. Tube amps use quite a lot of power and their sound can be captured very easily by some of the more expensive modelling amplifiers. It's a little bit like the tonewood debate in guitars, no one has been able to objectively prove it in electric guitars but some people swear by it.

The age old question: besides the obvious aesthetic attractiveness, is there really any kind of objective advantages to tube-based audio amps as opposed to solid-state semiconductor based ones?

soulofmischief 7y ago

Objectively speaking, if the subjective enjoyment of your music is generally increased, then that's a net positive. So it at least depends on the target audience.

jacquesm 7y ago
If the target audience is over 35 than chances are their wallets are fat but their ears are already shot. That won't stop them from blowing a lot of money on stuff that doesn't make a difference at all (either measurably or subjectively) but if it makes someone feel better they should be free to waste their money as they see fit.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Ha, yeah there's a lot of snake oil in the business. However, there is definitely a difference in sound, however subtle to some, between most tube and solid state amplifiers when it comes to recording music, as musicians tend to try to draw out certain sounds that are a consequence of the design of the amplifier, whether by overdriving the input or exploiting analog flaws, etc. Even when comparing just tube or solid state amps, there can be a lot of variance between them. This doesn't really apply to consumer-grade amplifiers where the goal is perfect sound reproduction. A good tube amp and a good solid-state amp shouldn't sound different to an untrained ear. But amplifiers used in production often try to differentiate themselves in some way sonically.
michaelt 7y ago
What if I'm balancing an increase enjoyment from feeling I've got better sound against a decrease in enjoyment from feeling I've being taken for a fool by snake oil salesmen?
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Refer to my response to Jacques below.

sound1 7y ago

In audio most objectivists believe that currently known measurements (frequency response, power handling abilities, THD, PSSR, other non linear distortions, noise floor, etc.) can 100% conclusively define subjective sound. But then on the flip side there are very reputable people (eg. Paul McGowan from PS audio) agree that we may not have figured out all measurements necessary to nail down subjective audio quality. It is upto the ears of the listeners and their exposure to super high end audio to decide whether that is true. I fall in the camp that thinks we haven't fully figured out what conclusively decides subjective sound quality. It makes things much more interesting and open to more research to settle debates on solid state vs tube, sigma-delta vs r2r dacs, full range driver vs other speaker configurations, cables/interconnects/power-cords matter or not and things like that). Some interesting links (I don't endorse what these guys are saying but find them VERY interesting): About DACs: http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8Mn5PrnZV-k http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8Mn5PrnZV-k About whether audio power cables make a difference (Ask Paul from PS audio): http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8QuToO9JUfw http://www.streamplayer.io/v1/sharing?v=8QuToO9JUfw

patentatt 7y ago
High end equipment makers have a vested interest in promoting pseudo science because it duped people into spending $5k for a DAC (e.g., PS Audio). Audio frequency range electrical engineering is very well understood and rigorously defined. The only extent to which there is an ‘x’ factor not covered by the legit engineering is that human perception does play a role in, well, human perception. So if you tell someone that this piece of equipment cost more than a car, people will genuinely believe it does sound better. Not too dissimilar from the very real placebo effect in medicine.
- avip 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I was recently listening to music in some audiophile house, streaming from ~15K$ eq. It wasn't even close to anything I've heard before, other than live music (in something like a jazz club, not a rock concert). Profound quality. I'm sure it's overpriced but man - if I had the money I would replicate his setup without a thought.

squarefoot 7y ago

Technically speaking there is zero advantage in using tubes instead of solid state when the amp is driven below distortion, that is for listening to music at normal level, and anyone claiming they can hear the difference between a decent 100 bucks class D amp and the most expensive tube amp in the galaxy is lying (probably also to themselves if they bought the latter). However, when tubes are driven to distortion, the waveform is clipped in a much gentler way compared to what is produced by solid state parts, so in a Hi Fi amp those high power peaks would indeed sound a lot cleaner, and in a guitar amp where distortion is looked for by design, using tubes would would produce a much nicer clipped sound, which is even more audible when playing chords. In HiFi amps the problem can be easily solved by designing (or buying) for more power than what is needed, so that the headroom reserve will be used to cope with those peaks without getting into clipping, while using tubes for guitar amps apparently still makes sense. Technology however has progressed a lot since the old days, most parts have become a lot cheaper, and even without resorting to digital manipulation todays solid state pure analog guitar amps can sound great without using tubes. One important point though: when making guitar amps with newer technologies such as class D, we must redesign everything so that the amp -I mean the power module- will never clip; no matter what we throw at the amplifier main input, the power module must never be driven into distortion because class D distortion is plain awful. That requires a lot of redesign: no more clipping tubes, coils driven into saturation, purposely weak designed power supplies etc, but simply speaking we distort before and keep the level put in order not to distort after. This makes things even more interesting because one builds the guitar sound much before it gets to the final stages, the only further contribution to the sound being the speaker and the cabinet, not the amp module.

mickael-kerjean 7y ago

Roughly speaking, tube amplifier goes in distortion adding pair harmonics when the solid state add odds ones. Odds harmonics aren't nice to the ear (see by yourself by listening to a Sawtooth wave) while even ones are much more flattering (see by yourself by listening to a triangle wave). This distortion relates to the entire theory that's behind the creation of chords and also to psychoacoustics.

mrob 7y ago
Both square and triangle waves contain only odd harmonics, with the high harmonics of the triangle wave rolling off faster. The sawtooth wave contains both odd and even harmonics. You can't have a wave with pure even harmonics because the fundamental is counted as an odd harmonic. If you half-wave rectify a sine wave you get only even harmonics above the fundamental, but to my ears this just sounds like two separate tones: the sine fundamental and a separate higher pitched odd-harmonic wave.

analog31 7y ago

My rule is: If it's real, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured, then it can be reproduced in solid state circuitry, perhaps using digital techniques if necessary. With that said, whether anybody is actually doing so satisfactorily is an open question. Actual test data for things like musical instrument amplifiers is remarkably sparse. And I won't begrudge anybody the pleasure of owning or building historic circuits.

isolli 7y ago
You will be very interested in the Carver challenge [0]. In 1985, Bob Carver challenged the Stereophile magazine by claiming that he could perfectly reproduce the sound of any amplifier they chose by tweaking one of his (solid-state) amplifiers. They took him up with a high-end tube amplifier, and he won. Note that he did not use measurements but a brute-force approach of feeding the difference in output signal of both amplifiers to a speaker, and listening for (and manually correcting) any residual output. https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge

mhh__ 7y ago

Not really. Tube amps use quite a lot of power and their sound can be captured very easily by some of the more expensive modelling amplifiers. It's a little bit like the tonewood debate in guitars, no one has been able to objectively prove it in electric guitars but some people swear by it.