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

I’m not sure how tubes are rated, and am by no means a tube amp expert, but if you attach the tubes in bridged mode, instead of push-pull you could get 2x the voltage, or 4x the power. So assuming this is done, it seems quite plausible to me that you could get 60 watts RMS out of a pair of 33 watt (peak) tubes.

The proof is in the listening however. The difference in dB between 60 and 40 watts is only 1.76 dB. Point being, things look a lot more different in wattage than they sound.

I should have said "...this varies by *genre*" 

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.

When CD's first came out, there were several measurements showing greater compression, and less channel separation between CD's and vinyl. There's even an interesting blog post somewhere showing how Thriller got more and more compressed with each re-release. Not a result of the medium. 

However, it doesn't have to be that way, and some of this has cooled off, but this varies by industry. 

Listen to Trombone Shorty on CD for an example. :) 

Best,

E

This has officially gone silly, so, let me set all of you straight on something:


Pineapple and pepperoni pizzas are wonderful things. 


You are welcome.

E

Let me put this another way.  Mom or Dad's cooking. If you grew up with it, isn't that the standard you judge everything else by, for good or ill? 

Do we do the same with electronics and speakers? 

I remember a story,perhaps in Mix, about the producer for U2 using a boom box to check his mixes. 

Between that and Stop Making Sense, and the hyper-compression of the 1980s you can see some of the problems I am alluding to. The decision makers for the final mix are trying to guess how the audience will listen. 

Some of my thoughts on this thread were about taste and taste-makers. 

Some of it however was wondering about the interaction of mastering engineers, speaker makers, and amplifier makers. 

In a very real way, THX film sound has things MUCH easier time than we do in music. There are objective measurements for frequency response and room acoustics which must be rigidly adhered to so a mastering engineer/sound editor isn't guessing about what speakers you might have, or amplifiers. 

That's not the case when it comes to music. There's tons of value judgements and expectations being made by the artists/engineers. 

I wonder about how this interaction defines the high-end. 

Interesting, because Dr. Leach’s paper on building a low TIM solid state amplifier was also around that time:

http://users.ece.gatech.edu/mleach/papers/lowtim/feb76feb77articles.pdf

It could very well be the time was right in 1974-1976 for an overall HI-Fi revival.

So the conclusion is, if we had transistors first, then all tube amps would be trying to be as good as transistors? :)