Solid State vs. Tubes - What if Transistors came first?

Tube amps are pretty sensitive to power cords too...

most never used snubber circuits to deal with the fact that diodes ring.

Actually its the power transformer that rings, which is why snubbing the rectifiers is often not that effective. HEXFRED rectifiers help, since it is the capacitance of the rectifier interacting with the inductance of the transformer that causes the ringing (otherwise known as a 'swept resonance'). But is actually the transformer that is doing the ringing!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a SIT just a big power JFET? And I may be wrong, but I think IXIS makes some. I heard somebody talking about how to make a MOSFET produce triode-like curves at BA, but I can't remember who or when.

I think it's safe to say, in any event, that if an amp sounds like this or that gain device, it's not a particularly exceptional amp.

SITs are something different. No-one makes them- it would otherwise be Big News.
I agree with your last comment; to me most transistor amps also sound like transistors. I've heard a few tube amps that sound like tubes- don't like that either. I like neutral.

I simply don't understand how one can conclude that dragging a diamond through a plastic trough doesn't cause wear. It defies logic, physics, and study.

It does wear, but takes a *lot* longer than the studies done in the early 1960s concluded (which are the studies most often cited in this regard). A lot has happened with cartridges and tone arm tech since then!! Most audiophiles I know don't listen to any one title long enough to actually wear it out; IMO this just simply isn't an issue.

There are ways to get clipping characteristics out of a transistor that are similar to a tube. It's just not done often.

The way to do it is to use SITs (Static Induction Transistors) aka VFETs. They have linearity similar to triodes and do have a soft clipping characteristic. They are the only such devices that have these properties other than real triodes. The problem is no-one makes them anymore, and further, no-one ever made driver and low level signal versions- just outputs. They've not been made since the late 70s or early 80s. The industry doesn't want to make linear devices anymore- everything is 'switching' to switching. That's why class D is on the rise. 

40-year-olds have no idea, save for a few cool ones, what tubes are.

I know a heap of 20 year olds that know what tubes are. Anyone that plays a guitar does...
The music industry dwarfs the high end industry. 

Thank God Apple and Bose are not responsible for what hi-fi is or will become.

+1

I am all for tubes, but saying they are not an obsolete technology is a bit of over-optimistic stretch of imagination. Ask anyone younger than 40 about tubes. Chances are they will not have any idea what you are even talking about, much less have ever seen or used one.

This has to do with human hearing-perceptual rules. The reason tubes are still around is that its easier to build a sonically pleasing amplifier with tubes than it is with transistors after all this time.

Sure, transistors have 'lower' distortion. But the distortions they have are far more audible to the human ear. One of the problems facing the audio industry is that harmonic distortions are not weighted according to how the ear perceives them. The 5th and 7th are far more audible than the 2nd; that is why many transistor amps are brighter and harsher than tube amps, even though they may have 100th the THD.

But in case anyone has any illusions, the larger tube plants are kept alive by the music industry, i.e. guitar amplifiers. But this allows for tubes to be advanced- such as the KT150, which didn't exist 10 years ago.

You are, in fact, dragging a rock through a groove made of plastic with force equal to hundreds of psi. The rocks wear out. I'm pretty sure the plastic does too.

This is a common strawman. There's no rock.

And this is kinda why I don't take vinyl fans too seriously. It's common knowledge vinyl is worth about 50 plays before it's lost noticable quality.

I would not call that common knowledge. I have LPs I liked so much that I played them every day for a year (Michael Oldfield's Songs of Distant Earth) and they still play fine. Still good too 25 years on... (that LP came out in 1993, the year of least vinyl production; A friend of mine and I imported all the original copies of this LP into the US 25 years ago)..

And then there's the obscene expense in just competently playing the things, as you pointed out. What's a halfway decent DAC cost? A few hundred bucks? A couple Grand for a really nice one? For distortion and dynamics that absolutely destroy vinyl.

The digital industry does not like to talk about aliasing, but it is a form of distortion and is in the recording- no matter how good your playback is, the digital playback tends to be brighter than real life since the ear converts that distortion (known in the analog world as *inharmonic distortion* and is a form of IMD) into tonality- in this case the brightness for which digital is known.

As for tubes...

They're material and labor intensive to make. Nobody would have developed the technology if something smaller, cheaper, and more efficient had come along first.nobody is developing vinyl or tape anymore. And why? Because digital is better. When superior things are born, inferior things die. Like punch cards. Like floppy disks. Like horse and carriage. Like typeset. Nobody will ever again develop a new kind of tube, except Korg for whatever reason. Those are kinda cool. I might like to build a pre-amp with some of those.

Henry T Moray developed the first germanium transistors in the 1920s which he later patented. IIRC one of the people that worked with him later developed the transistor at Bell Labs. Lilienfeld patented something very much like the FET in 1930. The problem with your statement above is this: Tubes were declared 'obsolete' in the 1960s. Its now 2018; tubes have been 'obsolete' now for longer than when they were the only game in town, thus debunking your claim above, since apparently they must not be 'inferior'. You don't have to know anything about engineering to understand this- its purely economic. If tubes were really inferior, they'd be gone, but the marketplace keeps them around. The market doesn't keep flathead engines around, doesn't keep punchcards and so on. Those are actually real examples of obsolete tech.

Vinyl is still being developed. Acoustic Sounds, a well-known high end audio LP producer in Salinas KS, has a pressing plant called QRP. QRP modified their pressing machines so they don't vibrate during the cooling process of the vinyl. The result is dead silent grooves. We've done some projects through them, but first you have to know one more thing:
If the cutter stylus is set right and at the right temperature, the groove that it cuts in the lacquer is so quiet that no matter what your playback electronics are, they represent the noise floor. IOW, in playing back a lathe cut, the lacquer is considerably lower noise than the best electronics.
Now the QRP pressings are so quiet that they often share this quality with lacquers. They've pushed the noise floor down by a good 10-20 db! I'm not sure how far, since the best we've been able to get our of our playback is -85 db and the QRP tests we've gotten back are quieter than that. So I'm just letting you know that your -70s figure that you've mentioned is a bit out of date.

It is basically a preamp tube, very small directly heated wire cathode so that will have to be DC driven. The gain in circuit is 3.5 where a 12AX7 is typically 50. The max gains are 5 and 100 respectively.

Output distorts badly at 1 volt out and there is little current. I can’t imagine this entering any high end audio circuits, though it will be fun for the guitar players as it distorts and lights up.

There's already product using it other than Korg.

The military has been experimenting with filament-less (cold cathode) tubes in integrated circuits (entire opamps done with cold cathode tubes) for several decades now.

Sorry man, but vinyl is the absolute most compressed and limited medium on the market.

I run an LP mastering operation if that’s any help here. You are incorrect about LPs on a number of counts. Specifically with LPs vs CDs, **usually** the CD is more compressed! The reason has nothing to do with the capabilities of either format. Its has to do with cars. Because CDs are expected to be played in cars, they are compressed. LPs have no such expectation, and generally have less or no compression whatsoever.
When we do an LP project from a digital master, it is for this reason that we try to get the master file that was made prior to CD mastering.
Regarding your bass comment about the middle of the LP, the statement is entirely false. Mastering houses don’t do that. Now there is this thing about out-of-phase bass, which is something that can show up in a multi-mic’ed recording but so far I’ve found that you don’t need to apply processing to get around that problem- you just need to spend time sorting out with test cuts how to get around the problem, which might be greater groove depth or cutting the overall modulation slightly- a 3db reduction is half the modulation in the groove.
IOW, I think you are confusing the things that people do to take shortcuts with the actual capabilities of the medium itself. The two are quite different!
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Still have yet to hear a solid state amp of any type that can keep up with the tube amps I have at home. Most of them I’ve heard just don’t want to play bass impact right!
The reason that the tubes/transistor debate has raged as long as the internet is simple- tubes aren’t bad nor are they obsolete. People don’t buy them because they want something antiquated. They buy them because there is less perceived distortion, although most people will tell you its because they are more detailed and smoother, which is the same thing.

If transistors had come first, the world of rock and roll would be vastly different!! You can't overdrive solid state amps very well at all; rock depends on that overdrive clipping sound that is still only available from tubes.

As to hifi, the discovery of an invention that does not have the harsh distortion coloration of typical solid state may well have given birth to the idea of high end audio, equipment designed to operate according to how we hear rather than specs sheets which are only designed to *look* good.

What would be so sad about a world without vinyl? Technically and sonically it doesn't hold a candle to digital lossless or 7.5ips tape. I've never understood the fascination so many have with audio technologies that predate the invention of the telephone.

Vinyl can easily exceed tape in all regards- wider bandwidth, lower noise, lower distortion. No-one is interested in wax cylinders or shellac 78s at this point, but the LP is certainly around for more reasons than high end if Best Buy, Target, Barnes and Nobles and so on are any indication.