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

Transistors don't transmit, they modulate. Therefore what follows is a representation of the original input signal, it's not the input signal itself amplified. Tubes amplify the signal itself. That's an important distinction. Furthermore, tube circuits should have less components in them to screw up the sound. Obviously tubes have their own issues, but only the best of the best solid state circuits can compare to tube gear that you can buy from small manufacturers for a fraction of the price of the high end transistor gear. Just stick to octal tube gear. All that said, it would be unfair to not recognize the improvements in solid state of late. High speed demands are raising the bar for passive and active devices, therefore semiconductors are getting better and more accurate all the time, but for now the best bang for the buck is still tube equipment. It's just too bad that it took me decades to figure this out!

Yes, the signal into a transister modulates the DC in the following stage, hence the term semi-conductor though properly written the hyphen isn’t there of course. It doesn’t actually conduct. There is always a PN junction, or a barrier. In a tube the electrons flow through. That likely accounts for the preception that tubes sound faster when dealing with good quality tubes in a well designed tube circuit. It only takes one crappy capacitor to screw up either type of circuit.

Wow, I just got an email alerting me to a post, which apparently the author pulled saying that we are the worst. How silly. Bikers will argue in favor of their favorite bike, car enthusiasts will argue the merits of their favorite car, ad nauseam. Humans argue their positions, and often try to win others over to their positions, so now I guess humans are the worst becsuse we don’t allow the fittest amoung us to lead us around by the nose, and tell us what we must think. Some love dark, IMO, dull sounding equipment because it doesn’t allow poorly engineered recordings to sound bad, I don’t go for that, but I understand it. I find it hard to believe due to my aversion to it now, but I used the enjoy equipment that would make people’s ears bleed, in search of detail to excess. If one likes darker sound a neutral system may sound bright to you. The point is that you ought to buy equipment that works for you! If you seek advice, you ought to attempt to seek out people who share your likes and dislikes, which is impossible to do completely, but describing what you like and don’t may help a little. The point is that while even I will slip at times, I ultimately know that tastes vary. There are ultimate truths, so when someone doesn’t understand that, one may take them to task, but that’s largely how man has learned, through reasoned debate. New scientific theories are rarely immediately accepted because they often displace older "established" beliefs, so the scientists battle things out intellectually and in laboratories. This forum should be a place for vigorous discussion and debate, because it’s all about learning our hobby just a little bit better, so rant on folks, just try to remain civil and understand that what you prefer may not be, well, more accurately stated, will not be agreed upon by all.

Hi Inna,
Tubes are not for everyone, I refused to use them for decades. I had worked on some tube equipment cameras and early vidio tape recorders, 3 inch tape on reels much like old reel to reel tape recorders. Video pickup was all done with tubes until CCD came along in the late 1980s, and various red, green, and blue video pickup tubes didn't seem to last that long, so I wasn't a tube lover. I did some mods for a friend, he had LS15, and LS16 Audio Research preamps. I installed soft recovery diodes in them, replaced some power supply capacitors and bypassed the capacitors in the tube stage, I was hooked after listening to them, and bought an LS15 for myself. Schitt Audio came along, and I bought their Yggdrasil DAC. I was so impressed that I went on to buy a Freya. Well, one of the guys who bought a Freya went on to buy a preamp made by Roy Mottram, and blown up by long time Citation and McIntosh tube refurbisher/modifier Don Sachs. Not being a tube guy, I figured that if I bought the SP14 kit from Roy, by the time I had mine tweaked out, which would be a learning process, I'd have more into it than if I just bought Don Sachs' version, so I bought a preamp from Don. Roy was in the middle of a move anyway, so it's also true that I was impatient and just wanted to be done. Well, the DS2, as Don calls it, so blew away the Freya, that I was hooked. Don's amp costs over 3K, and Upscale Audio was selling PrimaLuna Prologue Fives for 1100, so I bought one. It sounded better to me than any of my SS amps, especially once I got a set of Gold Lion KT88s, with Amperex 9 pins for drivers. I still lacked the deep soundstage that I was looking for and experience told me that octal drivers would sound better, so I went back to Roy Mottram. He, as luck would have it, was selling his personal amp, he didn't need the wattage and was down sizing. Well, I bought it, and it sounds awesome. I do intend to do a few things to it, but at this point I suppose I should have just purchased Don's amp and skipped the PrimaLuna, but then I wouldn't have learned as much as I have about tube amplifiers. Frankly either of Roy's kits, the ST70 or the ST120 with octal drivers is an awesome deal, as is his SP14 preamp. Unfortunately I always want to squeeze that last 10 percent out of audio equipment....

Hi Dave,
I was never willing to part with Krell or Levinson type of money. I suspect the haze may be a parts issue, with good caps, resistors, and such I am not hearing any haze. One other reason I have stayed away from Krell and Levinson was circuit complexity, it scares me. Certainly if properly designed, it theoretically isn’t an issue, but reality and theory are not alway in synch. That said, I have certainly heard too many good reports to completely write off transistors, especially Krell and Levinson gear. I’d especially like to hear them with Black Gate caps, but my bins are nearly empty... Anyway, it doesn’t ultimately matter if your or my stereo sounds like crap, as long as we are content that’s what matters, though I would love to check out other systems, but I think that I have maxed out my stereo budget! ;-)

A crap bomb, if YOU like, it's good. Yeah, that's a crap bomb! My knowledge and experience is finite, crap bomb. Got it, thanks for adding so much!

Wikipedia has this to say about KT88s and their wattage;
"A KT88 push-pull pair in class AB1 fixed bias is capable of 100 watts of output with 2.5% total harmonic distortion or up to about 50W at low distortion in hi-fi applications."
Just because a tube distorts less obviously doesn't mean it's clean. That said, as I understand it you can get a clean 60 watts out of them. I only worked with tubes in video and announcing systems, I have never worked in tube amplification design, so my knowledge is finite. That's why I went to Don Sachs and Roy Mottram, I have learned a little bit more about them, but I am far from an expert.

I don't believe that many, if any non electronic instruments go much over 15 or 16K, so I don't think that good tubes are a hindrance with regards to treble. You have found one amp you like. I'd guess that some Levinson amps, as well as some Spectral, and I hear JC1's and Nelson Pass's amps are top performers. The point being that with such a finite selection of really good SS amps, it ought to be no surprise that there aren't a lot of good sounding tube amps and preamps.

Andy2, I don't know what current SS amplifiers are using, but older amps used standard rectifiers, most never used snubber circuits to deal with the fact that diodes ring. Replacing them with soft recovery rectifiers like IXYS bridge rectifiers clears up a lot of strange issues with midrange and high frequency noise.

Well, I believe that John Curl went into a very enlightening discussion on how easily the standards can be gamed, not that that's happening in this case, but specifications are a lot more pliable than most understand. Again, I don't know these manufacturers, but 50wpc rms into 8 ohms is 100wpc rms into 4 ohms, and 50wpc rms is 100wpc, to name a few ways to spin things that I am familiar with. New Sensor claims 2 x 33 watts max for their tubes, 2 x 30 being the norm, so 50wpc gives you a nice cushion but 60wpc is within spec. Perhaps you ought to be asking those manufacturers how they can get more out of a tube than the manufacturer of the tubes says is reasonably possible. OTOH, if you listen to Kevin Deal of Upscale Audio, within a particular tube line, acceptable specifications greatly vary, so presumably they could be buying only tubes that exceed specifications. I personally would consider that to be deceptive unless they insist that those outputs are only obtainable using tubes sold by them. Furthermore, the best of the best tubes fade, so be it 100wpc, or 50wpc, as tubes age, your output capability will drop!

The wattages quoted, 30 something, is pertube, in a pushpull amp you'll double that.

Dave_b, I used to be pretty skeptical about power cords and such, it's also interesting that you mentioned SS being sensitive. When I bought my Yggdrasil DAC it was really bright. I initially thought that it was something downstream, an interconnect issue or something, but after spending a ton on ICs, I eventually relented and bought a hospital grade isolation transformer after a number of people suggested doing so, it fixed the problem. When I bought my tube preamp Don Sachs told me that I needed a good cable for it, but he suggested that virtually any heavy gage cable would be fine, so for tubes it's just a potential issue, and it would seem that for SS, it's not only about supplying sufficent current, but depending upon your incoming power it may well act as a filter, a filter that a tube based component apparently doesn't need. If so, that could also help explain yet another reason many prefer tubes. If they had unaddressed power issues when using SS gear, assuming for the sake of argument that tubes don't share that problem, would be one more reason that many prefer tubes.

Now that I think more about it, the tube preamp has a closely regulated power supply AND when I used standard 6X5GT rectifiers the preamp didn't sound all that good, I put in a Bendix 5852 and it sounded much better. Additionally, I used a couple of UF4007s and it sounded fine as well but a tube rectifier allows for a slow turn on, resulting in longer tube life, I'd have to add a delay circuit in order to use SS diodes all the time.

Hi Dsper,
The Coda would likely have been improved by using soft recovery rectifiers. IMO there should only be 3 choices. Clear, articulate gear, less so, and dark. The only matching ought to be how much of each one wants. Unfortunately, things like price point are such get in the way of all that. Once John Curl was talking up a new amplifier that he had designed with some tuning assistance, but the point is that once Parasound began selling them people bought them and were telling John, and everyone how bad they sounded. After a few folks complained and it became obvious that something was wrong, John bought an amplifier from a local dealers, opened it up and found that the manufacturer that Parasound contracted with had substituted some expensive components which had been specified. By saving a few dollars an amp they ruined the amplifier but made a lot more money on the ones they made. I don't know how Parasound handled it, but John told people what they needed to replace, and with what they should use. John used to post a lot on Audiogon, which is why I bring him up a lot, I am not on there so much these days so I don't know if Mr. Curl is still posting there, but he was a wealth of information.