Let's forget about being politically correct

My feeling it all depends on the entire system. Starting with the speakers. Some speakers are not going to be driven well with many tube amps. Some speakers are so sensitive they really do not reaquire serious solid state power. It all depends... so many factors...

I personally think this debate is a little silly. There are so many factors involved that having a set ideology (i.e. only limiting yourself to a tube preamp or tube amp) is in itself limiting. A person should not get wrapped up in the technology, so much as getting the best sound they can from their speakers (tubes or otherwise).

I have a pure SS system now. I have had tubes before. I have had a comination before. This hobby is all about synergy, and not about ideology.

KF

I am going to lift my imposed self ban on posting at Audiogon to respond to this thread.

Saying that in general tube preamps are better than SS preamps to me really has no meaning. My example of this would be when I got my Ayre K-3x w/phono stage preamp. Before, I was using a Sonic Frontiers 3SE preamp (the best tube preamp SF ever made) and a seperate pur tube phono stage (made by Cursio Electronics out of San Jose, CA). The SF3SE had upgraded Brimar tubes in it, and I liked the piece very much.

However, I brought the Ayre K-3x into my system, and all I can say is WOW! The K-3x with phono was a significangly better linestage in my system than the SF3SE. It was also a much better phono stage than my pure tube phono preamp. What does this tell me??? This tells me it is meaningless to make the generalization that tubes are better than SS for preamps. One must listen for themselves and make that decision on a case by case basis.

Getting into abstract philosophy of science and music rhetoric is an interesting endeavor. And I can tell Asa has studied a lot of philosophy primarilly because one of my majors is in philosophy. But where the rubber meets the metal, one must make a determination for themselves.

Before I made this preamp move to the K-3x, I had friends and 'experts' tell me there was no way is hell that the K-3x could outperform the SF3SE. They also said that the K-3x phono would in no way out perform a pure tube phono stage... Go figure...

Funny thing is that if someone with a good ear were blind folded and listened to my system, they would probably think it had at least 1 tube component. My system does sound more like tubes than SS. I have friends who are tube freaks (and hate SS) that love the sound of my system.

So much of listening to music is subjective. We all hear a little differently. Some of us cannot hear altogether. We all have mostly different systems more or less. We all have different rooms. And recordings... People tend to forget that the music they hear from a system first goes from the artist into a mic through wires into a mixer device of sorts into some sort of medium writer then onto some sort of medium which is then transposed/copied onto another medium which we play in our systems. If you really want to get technical, our music systems will never be able to actually portray music because science tells us that due to the vast difference in nature between music projected from an instrument and music projected from a speaker. There is a great article that was in Stereophile on this subject:

http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?78

I try to always write from experience and not from the theoretical. I strongly feel that following generalizations in audio like gosphel is not a good thing. It is like reading the specifications of a manual and thinking you know how a piece sounds. I personally have no idea how any piece would sound in my system until I put it in my system.

This is the difference between experience and the theoretical. One can theorize about anything, but in the end, one is not going to really learn anything until a person has experience. Philosophy and rhetoric (and advise) only get us so far. One can read books all day about music and listening to music. But this does not give us any experience with music. You have to do the listening if you want to experience music. We have to try out different things in our respective systems if we are going to learn about them and how components/cables/cords can influence the end sound of our systems.

And in a way, Audiophiles are scientist. Through a lot of trial and error we build our systems to sound better and better (hopefully). This last judgement may be somewhat subjective, but science is a lot ways IS SUBJECTIVE. Especially when related to the human body. I like pointing out that Nutritionalists love to debate about what is a good diet for us (see Mr. Atkins). The operation of the human body is still a mystery to science in a lot of ways, and only likely stories have described certain things. Scientific explanations themselves are likely stories that are surpassed by more likely stories when more accurate data has been obtained. Audiophiles are scientists of sorts... scientists that are have a very small test group making the experiments and judgements. It may not be like black and white number theory, but it is better than putting change in a spring wound meter and assuming that you are going to get your full 30 min for putting in two quarters. (On a side note, it took some 10 year old kid to do an experiment for a science fair on the old spring wound parking meters to see if actually one got the amount of time they had paid for. The meters he experimented on deviated so much (from exact time) it caused such a scare in the city (I think some folks sued class action), that all meters were replaced with digital ones. This pretty much set a trend for the entire US. No 'adult' or 'expert' initiated the childs experiments although as adults we are the ones that pay seriously for parking.) Go figure...

KF

Asa, my mind is open. I would wholly agree that the Supratek is a killer preamp. A local friend of mine got one recently (one of my tube friends). I love the piece, and it works well in his system. One day he will bring it down to my system. And, I may even get one eventually. The Supratek is better than his other preamp which is a tube one and was made for him specially by a tube equipment designer (I cringe to think how much money he has in his old preamp).

I personally think that preamps are some of the hardest pieces for companies to do well. So many of them are not good at all... My opinion is that the preamp tends to be the component that puts the biggest sonic fingerprint on the end sound of the music. However, I also think that one badly matched AC cord in a system can totally screw up the sound as well...

I have had other tube preamps before, but I used the SF3SE and Ayre K-3x as comperable high dollar examples. I do know there are not too many preamps I would be happy with, and very few would make my short audition (should I have to come up with one: Hovland HP100, Ayre K-1x, Supratek preamps, and Niagra PL-L.

I even am very fond of tube amps. I have a friend who has the Tenors in an absolutely reference system, and the Tenors + the rest of his system totally blows me away. I once almost bought a pair of the Wolcotts, but when I brought them home their were technical problems (turned out something came unsodered). Anyway I returned them. They would have probably sounded pretty darn good heh heh. My only problem with tube amps is the cost of maintaining the tubes. The more power they can put out, usually the more tubes they have, and the more it costs to retube them. My 2 channel system is used for both HT and 2 channel so my two channel amp is left on 24/7 and gets a good workout. I would go through amp tubes fast.

KF

Asa, I agree with your Nordost opinion. I ran Nordost QF for around 2 years, and did not make this realization until I tried other ICs. I do not think that I could state as eloquently as what you said about Nordost. I tend to describe the QF as having the effect of filtering music/signal. This filtration does make the end signal sound perhaps a bit cleaner (MP3 is effectively a filter as well that makes CD digital sound cleaner, as well as the CD medium itself is a filter for analogue sampling the wave at 44khz or so), but there is obviously detail that is missing from the QF when compared to other ICs. I have not tried the Valhalla IC, so I have no opinion of it. After hearing the Valhalla SC, however, I can imagine that the Valhalla IC is very good. My personal favorite IC now is the Jena Labs Symphony. The Jena Labs is no nonsense ultra ultra pure copper which is cryoed with no gimmicks. It has a transparency and a naturalness of sound that I have not heard in any IC that I have tried in it's price range ($1100/3' retail). Even at full retail, I think the Jena is worth every penny.

KF

Asa, language is too imprecise to really express correctly or solve the problem you pose about being and the mind's existance. There is a point at which science has to solve the problem.

Language and philosophy are not terribly good problem solvers. At least not for problems better directed at Science. The big problem is the imprecision of language. Words themselves are built upon a foundation that intertwine our life experiences which are intertwined with our cultural experience. Words themselves have diferent meanings to different people. Ultimate translation even within the same language of ideas is well... next to impossible. MEANING: For someone to hear the same sentence or read the same sentence as another person, both would take it to mean the EXACT same thing if their were perfect translation. Even with set defined terms... Terms are defined by other terms... which are defined by other terms... And eventually a full circle in term definition happens. Try defining the term 'is'. Clinton sure had fun with it, heh heh. We all think we have command of our native tongue, but most people sadly are mistaken. Many people do not really realize that for every term we think we know, our idea of that term is encompassed by that term and ITS OPPOSITE. This critical concept of know a thing and its opposite at the same time gives us the amazing ability to close our eyes and envision our reality differently. Knowing what the term 'is' means is knowing what being & not being is at the exact same time.

Aristotle seperated the physical from the metaphysical in his lectures of the Physics and the Metaphysics. He seperated the two because there is something that distinctly seperates a live person/animal from a dead person/animal. When something dies there seems to be a transition of the Metaphysical. Physics does not really enter the picture. What drove man for Aristotle was the desire to partake in the devine as much as possible.

Now progressing to more modern philosophy (Nietzsche), thought that all we could be sure of was our will to power. Thus, when it really got down to it, our metaphysical aspects for Nietzsche was a simple will to influece the world.

What does this all this Philosophy mumbo jumbo have to do with Audio?

Well, the world we live in is both subjective and objective for us at precisely the same time. Our mind through our senses translates our subjective view of the world, but at the same time it holds the idea that this is a translation of some sort of objective perspective. The rational mind knows that when you close your eyes the entire world does not disappear even though it does for us on the subjective level. Hearing music projected by an audio system is working to understand the the music sonic representation and the performance on a subjective level as well as realizeing that there is an objective perspective to what is being heard. We may never truely realize this objective perspective, but we can at least try to realize it to the best of our abilities. Why? Because we have the will to do it. For us this task seems to have meaning. We want to take part in the devine to our greatest extent, and music for us seems like part of the devine. We try to realize music through experience through our senses. Just as a scientist tries to realize the nature of the universe through experience with scientific methodology and experiments.

This gets us back to the question of the mind seemingly being and not being at the same time in existence. This is a question that cannot be answered by the crude language we posess. It is for science to come up with a likely story to explain the mind.

A personal answer to the question would be that the minds can be compared to a computer. From a physics standpoint a computer has form and exists. However, inside a computer there exists perfect ones and zeroes that the computer interprets. These ones and zeroes are part of a whole that has some sort of meaning or purpose. What happens when we unplug a computer? What happens when we die? There is a level of existance or being that seemingly transcends simple physics. Because simple physics cannot describe why humans really do anything that is not just to sustain a person's life. Is it simply will to power? Or do we want to take part in some sort of divine? When we open our minds, we find perfect ideas we never see in reality. Where did we ever come up with the idea of equality or the unit? We gave computers seemingly perfect ones and zeros and now they can beat most humans at Chess. Science one day I think is going to figure this out and answer your question Asa. Philosphers have tried and have not been too successful.

KF