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I’ve always heard the preference for tubes[a] comes from them having a “warmer” sound. Could that warmer sound be alleviating the “listening fatigue”? [a]: by

I’ve always heard the preference for tubes[a] comes from them having a “warmer” sound. Could that warmer sound be alleviating the “listening fatigue”? [a]: by non-audiophiles

uxp100 4y ago
And to cut a little more audiophile fuzziness out, I’d say I’d associate warmer with high cut and boosted upper mids. Which sounds like it would alleviate fatigue to some degree, perhaps be perceived as louder at a given spl. Tangentially, I built a little transmission line speaker, see Woden Designs Baby Labs pdf, I built the redeye, IIRC, the one that used the cheapest driver. The little 3 inch driver really rolls off above 10k, I’m missing a whole octave of the highest frequencies, and I’ve spent some time around planers and table saws and electric guitars, don’t have the best ears, but side by side with other speakers you notice. But anyway, the point is you notice, but it really doesn’t sound bad to lose a little high end. Something is missing, but it’s not ugly to listen to in the way some other speaker defects are.
adrian_b 4y ago
By "warmer" sound, it is meant that, even if the tube amplifiers normally produce greater distortions than many of the more modern amplifiers, for some reason this kind of distortions sounds more pleasant than other kinds of distortions. If some amplifiers would be ideal, producing no distortions, they could not be distinguished in any way, regardless what devices have been used to implement them. The modern Class-D amplifiers can behave almost ideally when amplifying low-frequency signals, but for the signals with frequencies close to the upper limit of the audio range their behavior becomes much less ideal. While I have pleasant memories about a tube amplifier that I have used many years ago, I have never made comparative tests with other amplifiers, so I could not say whether it was better or worse regarding "listening fatigue". Even when comparative tests are done in an identical setup, by swapping a tube amplifier with another amplifier, it is extremely difficult to disentangle which audio differences are caused by using tubes as the amplifying devices, which are caused by the audio transformers included in most tube amplifiers and which are caused by the interaction between the amplifier outputs and the loudspeakers, which can be very different between different kinds of amplifiers, due to their different relationship between output impedance and signal frequency.
bitwize 4y ago
"Warm" sound is rolloff of the highs by the amplifying equipment.
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JKCalhoun 4y ago
I hate to even bring more audiophilespeak into the thread, but I have heard the distortion (harmonics) are "even" in tube amplifier architectures, "odd" in solid-state. (I don't even know what that means though, or in any event why that would be.)

I’ve always heard the preference for tubes[a] comes from them having a “warmer” sound. Could that warmer sound be alleviating the “listening fatigue”? [a]: by non-audiophiles

uxp100 4y ago

And to cut a little more audiophile fuzziness out, I’d say I’d associate warmer with high cut and boosted upper mids. Which sounds like it would alleviate fatigue to some degree, perhaps be perceived as louder at a given spl. Tangentially, I built a little transmission line speaker, see Woden Designs Baby Labs pdf, I built the redeye, IIRC, the one that used the cheapest driver. The little 3 inch driver really rolls off above 10k, I’m missing a whole octave of the highest frequencies, and I’ve spent some time around planers and table saws and electric guitars, don’t have the best ears, but side by side with other speakers you notice. But anyway, the point is you notice, but it really doesn’t sound bad to lose a little high end. Something is missing, but it’s not ugly to listen to in the way some other speaker defects are.

adrian_b 4y ago

By "warmer" sound, it is meant that, even if the tube amplifiers normally produce greater distortions than many of the more modern amplifiers, for some reason this kind of distortions sounds more pleasant than other kinds of distortions. If some amplifiers would be ideal, producing no distortions, they could not be distinguished in any way, regardless what devices have been used to implement them. The modern Class-D amplifiers can behave almost ideally when amplifying low-frequency signals, but for the signals with frequencies close to the upper limit of the audio range their behavior becomes much less ideal. While I have pleasant memories about a tube amplifier that I have used many years ago, I have never made comparative tests with other amplifiers, so I could not say whether it was better or worse regarding "listening fatigue". Even when comparative tests are done in an identical setup, by swapping a tube amplifier with another amplifier, it is extremely difficult to disentangle which audio differences are caused by using tubes as the amplifying devices, which are caused by the audio transformers included in most tube amplifiers and which are caused by the interaction between the amplifier outputs and the loudspeakers, which can be very different between different kinds of amplifiers, due to their different relationship between output impedance and signal frequency.

bitwize 4y ago

"Warm" sound is rolloff of the highs by the amplifying equipment.

deleted 4y ago
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JKCalhoun 4y ago

I hate to even bring more audiophilespeak into the thread, but I have heard the distortion (harmonics) are "even" in tube amplifier architectures, "odd" in solid-state. (I don't even know what that means though, or in any event why that would be.)