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Interesting. While I agree that for a powerful audio amplifier the only good choices are either a state-of-the-art switching amplifier made with gallium nitrid

Interesting. While I agree that for a powerful audio amplifier the only good choices are either a state-of-the-art switching amplifier made with gallium nitride transistors or an archaic amplifier with vacuum tubes (while the intermediate historical technologies between these 2 extremes are obsolete), unfortunately it is very difficult to indulge in the latter choice, when the prices of good vacuum tubes have become orders of magnitude greater than in their heyday, e.g. at your link the price for a matched pair of WE300-B is $1500 and for a matched quad $3100, while the price of a complete ready-to-use amplifier is too ridiculously high.

boring-human 6mo ago
Not to mention the cost of the gold-plated audiophile cables to wire it...
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Among amplifiers that are not perfectly neutral, vacuum-tube amplifiers subjectively seem more pleasant. Moreover, while an electronic audio amplifier made with modern components can be made perfectly neutral when terminated on a resistive load, i.e. it can reproduce any input signal without any changes except amplification at its output, once you connect loudspeakers at its output the amplifier-loudspeaker chain is no longer neutral, i.e. it no longer has a flat transfer function between the electrical input and the sound output and it is not at all clear which should be the output impedance of the amplifier as a function of frequency to ensure the least degradation of the sounds in comparison with the input signal. So it may happen that a vacuum-tube amplifier - loudspeaker system has actually a better overall fidelity than a typical audio amplifier that was designed to demonstrate a much higher fidelity on a resistive load (because thus the transfer function is easy to measure and correct, unlike the complete transfer function to sounds). In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive and the normal amplifiers are good enough for the majority of people.
  - boring-human 6mo ago
    > Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. I don't disagree. Not in the same class, but the audience overlaps. > one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive In other words, the willingness to pay for OG tube amplifiers exceeds the willingness to pay for the sound thereof. I'm not sure you disagree with me either.
    - adrian_b 6mo ago
      As a child, I have used some very good vacuum-tube audio amplifiers, which had been built by my father, at a time when they were still the cheapest solution, instead of being a luxury product. They were excellent, so I feel nostalgia remembering them, and I would like to experience again listening through such an amplifier. Nevertheless, if I had so many thousands of $ to spare, I would rather buy some memory modules ... :-( When I was young I made a few unusual transistor power audio amplifiers, e.g. with the output transistors biased in class A and designed for high output impedance instead of low output impedance. I was very satisfied with their sound and some of them resembled more some vacuum-tube amplifiers than typical transistor-based audio amplifiers. However, despite their high audio quality they would have been completely impractical as commercial products, because they needed very big power supplies and they produced an enormous amount of heat. Semiconductor devices are much more difficult to cool than vacuum tubes, for the same amount of heat (because the temperature limit for the former is much lower than for the latter). Nowadays, switching amplifiers can cover all the audio bandwidth with excellent energy efficiency. With an appropriate combination of linear and non-linear feedbacks, one could reproduce both the distortions and the output impedance of vacuum triodes, to make an amplifier hard to distinguish from true vacuum-tube amplifiers.
  - robotresearcher 6mo ago
    >In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this Don't almost all transistor guitar amps do this?
deleted 6mo ago
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boring-human 6mo ago

Not to mention the cost of the gold-plated audiophile cables to wire it...

adrian_b 6mo ago
Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Among amplifiers that are not perfectly neutral, vacuum-tube amplifiers subjectively seem more pleasant. Moreover, while an electronic audio amplifier made with modern components can be made perfectly neutral when terminated on a resistive load, i.e. it can reproduce any input signal without any changes except amplification at its output, once you connect loudspeakers at its output the amplifier-loudspeaker chain is no longer neutral, i.e. it no longer has a flat transfer function between the electrical input and the sound output and it is not at all clear which should be the output impedance of the amplifier as a function of frequency to ensure the least degradation of the sounds in comparison with the input signal. So it may happen that a vacuum-tube amplifier - loudspeaker system has actually a better overall fidelity than a typical audio amplifier that was designed to demonstrate a much higher fidelity on a resistive load (because thus the transfer function is easy to measure and correct, unlike the complete transfer function to sounds). In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive and the normal amplifiers are good enough for the majority of people.
- boring-human 6mo ago
  > Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. I don't disagree. Not in the same class, but the audience overlaps. > one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive In other words, the willingness to pay for OG tube amplifiers exceeds the willingness to pay for the sound thereof. I'm not sure you disagree with me either.
  - adrian_b 6mo ago
    As a child, I have used some very good vacuum-tube audio amplifiers, which had been built by my father, at a time when they were still the cheapest solution, instead of being a luxury product. They were excellent, so I feel nostalgia remembering them, and I would like to experience again listening through such an amplifier. Nevertheless, if I had so many thousands of $ to spare, I would rather buy some memory modules ... :-( When I was young I made a few unusual transistor power audio amplifiers, e.g. with the output transistors biased in class A and designed for high output impedance instead of low output impedance. I was very satisfied with their sound and some of them resembled more some vacuum-tube amplifiers than typical transistor-based audio amplifiers. However, despite their high audio quality they would have been completely impractical as commercial products, because they needed very big power supplies and they produced an enormous amount of heat. Semiconductor devices are much more difficult to cool than vacuum tubes, for the same amount of heat (because the temperature limit for the former is much lower than for the latter). Nowadays, switching amplifiers can cover all the audio bandwidth with excellent energy efficiency. With an appropriate combination of linear and non-linear feedbacks, one could reproduce both the distortions and the output impedance of vacuum triodes, to make an amplifier hard to distinguish from true vacuum-tube amplifiers.
- robotresearcher 6mo ago
  >In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this Don't almost all transistor guitar amps do this?

deleted 6mo ago

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