6 ms·

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 the

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

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