6 ms·

My guess is that people are buying tubes because of the impression that they are rare and hard to get, and owning one is a privilege, which makes people accept

• Turskarama 4y ago
  I don't know that that's quite it, people like them because they have a different sound. Objectively speaking, they do a worse job of recreating audio, but they do it in a consistent way that people like.
  • teddyh 4y ago
    If people only liked the sound, I would assume that it could be emulated on the digital sound processing platform they already use. People buying tubes must be something else.
    • elseweather 4y ago
      I dunno, man. At least with guitar amps the solid state ones _try_, but even expensive ones kinda suck compared to a tube amp
      • charrondev 4y ago
        I haven’t been able to tell the difference for a while. I switched from a Marshal JTM45 to an Axe FX III w/ a big FR/FR cab and it sounds damn good and is a lot more flexible. The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less. Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
      • kazinator 4y ago
        Many solid state guitar amps are made by the tube amp companies, who have a vested interest in treating those models as entry-level stuff from which the real pro is supposed to upgrade to the inconvenient tube stuff. The mistake with most solid state guitar amps is that they have similar wattages to tube amps. At stage volumes, it's easy for a measly 50 or 100W thing to go into clipping. If you want solid-state guitar amplification, skip guitar amps and use a high wattage power amp used for sound reinforcement. E.g. something that puts out like 800W or more into a 4 Ohm load. This will have the headroom not to crap out when competing with the other guitarist's 100W head. Not only that, but it will cost you less $$$ (particularly in the second hand market), and likely weigh less than your friend's 100W tube head. Solid state guitar amps from guitar amp companies are snake oil, basically. They are not representative of what you can do with solid state. Did you know Eddie Van Halen used solid state amps? One thing he did was to use a Marhsall tube amp head as a giant guitar pre-amp: capture the speaker output, reduced to line level, and re-amplify with a power amp, like a H&H V800.
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Yeah, hard for me to wrap my head around why you would throw high speed digital circuitry, DSPs, and complex algorithms into a box to try and emulate the sound that a simple heated cathode in an evacuated glass tube can produce. $24 can still get you a decent 12AX7, I believe.
    • munificent 4y ago
      There are many many digital tube amp emulations and they are widely used. But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on. There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse. I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work. Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.
      • teddyh 4y ago
        That magical thinking only works, though, if the object in question is special in some way. If it can be had for a dime a dozen at any time from any local corner store, the object loses its magic.
        • bb88 4y ago
          That's the thing, tubes used to be a dime a dozen. Just not anymore once transistors took over. I'm not saying it's not nostalgia, it could very well be....
          • teddyh 4y ago
            Exactly my point. If tubes still were, and always had been, a dime a dozen, then nobody would care about building (or buying) fancy expensive equipment with tubes! Tubes would be seen as obsolete junk.
            • 4y ago
    • bb88 4y ago
      It's possible it's just pure nostalgia on my part I guess, but my experience is that 1950's to 70's music sounds better on a tube amp. I'm speculating that the music was mixed for tubes -- and they wanted the warm sound of the tube to come through. So the sound was mastered for the imprecise tube amps of the time.
    • retrac 4y ago
      Modern digital sound processing allows the flawless recreation of a piano, and even to create an instrument with qualities no piano built in the old style could have. Everything, and more. Cheaper, probably portable, and it doesn't require tuning. In fact, most people who play the piano now play on such instruments, most of the time. Yet some people still buy actual pianos. Because there's an art and craft and history to pianos, and they're majestic, slightly intimidating machines; and they're expensive status symbols. A tube amp for a guitar is much the same.
      • teddyh 4y ago
        Yes, because pianos are still viewed as special, which is in turn because they are expensive to buy, hard to transport, take up a lot of space, and requires regular service (tuning). But tubes lack (or could potentially be made to lack) all of these qualities, which is why it would be risky to try to make tubes more cheaply available.
        • retrac 4y ago
          A tube amplifier made in the style of mid-20th century ones is expensive, hard to transport, bulky, and requires regular tuning/maintenance (when compared to a solid-state device). Like you say, that's why people still buy and make them.
      • kazinator 4y ago
        > Modern digital sound processing allows ... ... what the power amplifier and speakers that you can afford then forbid. You will simply not re-create the sound that a real piano creates in a room with a digital signal, going into some amp and pair of ordinary speakers.
        • Blackthorn 4y ago
          How fortunate, then, that 99.9% of all piano music heard is going through an amp and a pair of ordinary speakers! I've made it a point to attend classical music concerts, and even I think that 0.1% might be pushing it when it comes to the piano sounds I've heard in a room. I've got nice flat-response studio monitors so I could get a close enough room sound if I wanted (not that I could play a piano worth a damn in order to do that LOL). Honestly they weren't particularly expensive. Certainly less expensive than a single piano tuning!
    • JohnBooty 4y ago
      Digital emulation also usually involves some milliseconds of lag, which may or may not matter for a specific use case.
      • kazinator 4y ago
        Every foot of air between your ear and a musical instrument (or its speaker cabinet, if applicable) adds about a 0.9 ms delay.
        • Clamchop 4y ago
          But we'd be talking about differential lag between various signals, which is worse.
      • tiberious726 4y ago
        Even professional musicians can't detect less than 20ms of latency. You have plenty of budget
    • progrus 4y ago
      You’d think, but you still need a megahertz-resolution DSP to emulate some signal chains closely, due to phasing and reflected harmonics: https://youtu.be/GjtEIYXrqa8 https://youtu.be/GjtEIYXrqa8 Although to be fair, most of the time “liking the sound” is indeed just due to quirks of the analog implementations, like eq cramping. Those differences were emulated long ago, and producers often do reach for a “colored” emulation instead of the “ideal” digital filter.
      • systems_glitch 4y ago
        This. It's so simple to just use tubes if you want it to sound like tubes and don't need to carry it in your pocket.
      • ilyt 4y ago
        Funnily enough, same problem with trying to emulate CRT on LCDs
      • kazinator 4y ago
        In terms of audio, you only have to emulate what can actually be heard. Ears don't hear phase effects that require megahertz resolution. (Ears hear only binaural phase effects. If the phase doesn't change when you turn your head, it is not relevant.)
        • progrus 4y ago
          Check out the video. Harmonics above Nyquist can still reflect back into the audible range. About phasing issues, it is not usually the path-difference between your two ears, but harmonic interference due to mixing the phased signals, which cancels out desirable frequencies. Although I do have another excellent Dan Worrall video for you, about the ears thing: https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8 https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8
• skupig 4y ago
  Maybe, but analog components can really "color" audio. Filtering, resonance, ringing, slew- when you have devices that respond slowly and nonlinearly to DC voltage you get all sorts of effects on an AC signal. The most reliable way to reproduce the way a component affects the sound is just to use that component. Also... they look cool.
• daydream 4y ago
  Tube amps are used in both creating music (guitar amps, bass amps, etc) and listening to music (hifi preamps, power amps, etc). Tube amps used in creating music usually have a distinctive sound. Fender Twin Reverb and Ampeg SVT are but two of the many tube amps with a distinctive sound. Solid state amps typically have a very different sound. Yes, there are digital amp simulators and yes they are very good nowadays. But lots of musicians want the real thing. That may not appeal to you, and you may dismiss it, but that’s the case. People generally aren’t buying an expensive tube guitar amp because they think they’re rare - tube amps are not hard to find. They’re buying them because they like the sound. Tubes in hifi equipment is a whole other ballgame. No comment on that one.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > They’re buying them because they like the sound. You’re giving guitar players too much credit, they are only one step below “audiophiles” in their love for snake oil and marketing. Tube amps persist mostly because guitar players instinctively turn their nose up at solid state, due to tubes having been the state of the art when the first generation of world famous electric guitarists was young. Bass players are slightly better, mostly because an SVT head weighs 80 pounds and nobody wants to lug them around.
    • temporallobe 4y ago
      I use both solid state and tube amps, and for vastly different use cases. I use a small 7-watt tube amp for my studio setup, and it does has a much different feel and tone than any of my emulators or solid state amps. Although amp sims and cab IRs are getting incredibly good these days, there’s just that inimitable magical spark that tube amps have. There’s also nothing quite like a maxed tube amp, which has so-called power amp distortion. On the other hand, tube amps are a PIA and are prone to having those delicate tubes shake their innards apart if jostled the wrong way, not to mention their backbreaking heft. Therefore I use a solid state/modeler amp on stage, because of far better reliability, weight reduction, and versatility. Now there are even pedal amps, with class D power amps built in, so guitarists need only bring their pedalboard and maybe a cab. But when it comes to recording, most studios are still gonna prefer genuine, preferably vintage, tube amps. Nobody really gives a shit about your tone on stage anyway.
• mustacheemperor 4y ago
  Guitar players and hifi folks have been buying and using tubes since before they became popular and obsolete enough to be scarce and expensive. I’ve seen more than a few voice the complaint that they can’t find good tubes for under a buck at goodwill and garage sales anymore.
• retrac 4y ago
  The tubes that are currently still produced (mostly late designs for audio use) have never been particularly rare, at least until very recently. I'm pretty sure the 12AX7 has never gone out of production completely worldwide. There's several manufacturers; one in China, one in Slovakia, and one in Russia, at least. As the article notes the fact that a lot of tubes come from Russia is causing a bit of a price spike now. But in general, since the transistors took over, they've been available for about $10 in current dollars, only a little more expensive than they were back in the 1960s. US manufacturing faded out in the 80s, but tubes were manufactured elsewhere commonly into the 90s. It's apparently still profitable to manufacture them for $10 or so, at least with legacy tube-making equipment. The real expensive ones are like binned semiconductor parts. The best frequency response, least micro-vibrations, etc. Or manually selected pairs with similar properties. But if you just want to replace the pre-amp and don't care much they were like $12 just a couple years ago. So I don't know what the collectors are doing, really. Not exactly a market you can corner so long as people keep burning out their tubes and multiple companies keep making them.
  • systems_glitch 4y ago
    At least with one of the factories in Russia, Electro-Harmonix ended up buying them when they were in financial trouble, just to secure their supply of tubes. I'm sure the current situation with Russia has messed that purchase up (it was done years and years ago), but they probably still need tubes, as they have products they still manufacture that require them!
• Syonyk 4y ago
  > If a domestic factory starts cranking out tubes, even with a similarly high price, the impression of rarity and unavailability won’t be there, and I suspect that people then won’t buy them. I expect that would improve tube sales, rather dramatically. Lower priced, high quality tubes, made without slave labor or something near it, and with actual quality control? That would be rather popular in many circles. I'm aware it's an unpopular thing to point out on HN, but we are very much in the middle of a vinyl resurgence, with LPs having drastically outsold CDs in 2022, and showing no signs of slowing down. Make fun of it however you want, but there's very strong interest right now in analog, non-digital, non-consumer-tech, non-tracked-and-data-collection sound. Tubes go well with that, and quite a few high end audio vendors these days have various tube amps in addition to their semiconductor based amps. It seems a good place to be, and I wish him the best of luck with it - I may have to see if I can acquire a set or two down the road when prices drop a bit.
  • fsckboy 4y ago
    drastically outselling physical CDs in an age of digital download is not really a claim to fame. I'm sure a lot more buggy whips and buggies are sold than steam cars.
    • Syonyk 4y ago
      If it were solely due to CD sales dropping, you'd have a point. But vinyl is selling radically more, year over year, every year since 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival#/media/File:US_vinyl_sales_1995-2020.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival#/media/File:US_v... To finish the graph out, 2021 was 41.7M and 2022 is 43.5M. You can write it off however you want, but to dismiss it as irrelevant is a good way to miss what's going on in the world.
      • fsckboy 4y ago
        I wasn't writing off vinyl (and I've seen the news that it's increasing), I was just saying that comparing it to CDs was failing to land a punch. And my "buggy whips/steam cars" analogy was spot on. ever notice how after a destructive tornado they say "it looks like a bomb went off", and after a bomb goes off they say "it's like a tornado blew through here". Not the same situation as the CDs, but the same in that my brain says "wait a minute..." and if you want to impress the listener, you don't want them thinking "now holup"
• ilyt 4y ago
  There are different applications for tubes. Snobefest audiophoolery will complain they are "not like the originals", but people buying them for nice distorted guitar sound will be entirely fine with it.
• voldacar 4y ago
  The impression of rarity? They are expensive because of actual rarity. These things are highly labor intensive to make and producing tubes with a consistent level of quality requires extreme attention to parts tolerances and procedure. Do you buy tubes or are you just opining on something you have no experience with? I would kill to be able to get a pair of good 300Bs for 100$