The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

Carlos269, upon reading this article I am struck by the simple fact that the guy who wrote it must have an atrocious monitor system! -and is either partially deaf (common with engineers in the studio) or simply has no idea which way is up. I too have run recording studios for the last 30 years and digital has to be one of the biggest single steps backwards to occur in that time.

Using 24-bit files (which we use as backups for our analog machines), **anyone** who hears the comparison between them always comments on how much better the analog machines sound. There is a greater sense of presence, greater sense of soundstage, improved tonality (I find that even with the 'treble' controls run all the way down, that digital often still sounds bright). Admittedly, the 88KHz scanning and higher has helped a lot since you get rid the brickwall filter, but they still, in a word, suck.

As far as conditioning goes, please re-read my comments- your comments sound like you did not read mine. For brevity I will restate one thing- most high end audio conditioners are terrible. But if you thus assume *all* are therefore bad you commit a logical fallacy called 'guilt by association'. see http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ for more info on logical fallacies.

As far as tubes go: if you build single-ended transistor circuits you will get terrible distortions, requiring a lot of feedback to (poorly) correct. So most transistor circuits these days are balanced, even if they only have single-ended inputs. With tubes you can not only build them single-ended, but you can run them zero feedback and they will still have acceptable distortion figures (if you are able to run them at a low enough level the distortion cannot be measured). The Ampex 351 is an example of such a beast. Its distortion is quite low until you are nearly saturating the tape, and there is less phase shift than you see in digital systems. As you record at lower levels (for example, hall ambiance) the distortion vanishes.

Compare that to digital: if you have 16 bits to express 0VU, you get only 8 to express -45 db (where the hall ambiance is). 8 bits sounds like a cheap phone message machine. Its not hifi. That is why digital lacks low level detail.

Now don't get me wrong- there are a lot of products out there that take advantage of tube distortions in order to create effects. Often they starve the tube; a circuit that should be running 200V on the plate of the tube is only getting 12Volts, things like that. Its a fact that tubes have pleasing distortions, and its something that everyone should pay attention to, because devices that have irritating distortions aren't going to help :) This is why I spoke of human perceptual rules earlier- our ears find these things pleasant or unpleasant for a reason!
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Al, the reason a power cord can have this effect is simple. If there is a 2 volt drop in a power cord, the filaments of the tubes will run cooler and the B+ will be reduced. Since this is a voltage, the result is we get less voltage output out of the amp. Less voltage=less power. Depending on the amp this can be pretty profound. and I have seen it with my own eyes. I do agree though that that does not justify a $2000 power cord, but it **does** justify one that has decent connectors and conductors that will not heat up at all. That has to cost something, probably not $2000 though. One thing about audio is that if there is a phenomena, there is also snake oil for it.

I have to debunk some of what is being said here.

The reel to reel thing: Think about how you do your dubs from LP. If you are like me, you use headphones plugged into the tape machine for a monitor. I usually keep the speaker volume down, as there is no microphonic upset to the LP that way. The result is that the LP playback is more accurate than it is with the volume up. So tapes can indeed sound better on this account.

Second: distortion in tubes- it is important to follow the rules of human hearing, not made up stuff on paper with no meaning to the human ear. The ear finds trace amounts of odd-ordered harmonics to be unpleasant, audiophiles have terms like 'bright', 'harsh', 'brittle', 'clinical' and the like to describe odd-ordered (5th, 7th, 9th) distortions of less than 1/100th of a percent. The reason we are so sensitive to these harmonics is because the ear uses them to determine how loud a sound is. If you violate this fundamental rule, its instantly audible.

By contrast, the lower orders (2nd, 3rd, 4th) are not objectionable and humans will tolerate several orders of magnitude more than above (10%-30%) without objection. Push-pull amps of both tube and solid state cancel even orders, so really the 3rd is the big deal, and it tends to be quite low compared to the 2nd. IOW, distortion is not something that is somehow inherent to tubes, if you know anything about electronics then you know that triodes are some of the most linear devices known.

Power cords: a 2V drop across a power cord can rob a tube amplifier of as much as 40% of its output power! Cripes! You're trying to say you can't hear that?? So this is very measurable and audible as well. On lesser transistor amps, a power cord will be less audible as the drop across the cable is reduced, but a class A transistor amp will easily bring out cable weaknesses.

That is not the end of it with power cables either. Most conventional power supplies consist of a power transformer, rectifiers and filter caps. The caps usually only charge on peaks of the waveform unless the circuit is just starting up. This means that the cord has to pass high frequency bursts of current as the rectifiers commutate. Some cords don't have the bandwidth. The difference between the worst and the best is about 10% in this department, that is what audiophiles are hearing. Again, this is easily measured if you know what to look for.

Power conditioners: If they did not work, there would not be industrial power conditioners that are aimed at markets other than high end, although in the high end world most of the power conditioners are terrible. The best was made by Elgar and is an industrial design that is too mechanically noisy to put in your living room, but will put out a perfect sine wave. The 5th harmonic of the AC line is the issue: this will cause rectifiers to become noisy, transformers to become noisy and generate excess heat, and cause synchronous motors used in turntables and tape machines to weaken and actually have counter-rotational forces. Fluke instruments produced a white paper of the 5th harmonic nearly 20 years ago. Again, this is quite measurable and audible.

I can go on, but I think you get my point- the things audiophile hear are often real (and yes, often made up too). As soon as you close your mind, thinking that everything is figured out, you create a blind spot for yourself because that will be about something that you don't know, and you won't know that you don't know it.

No doubt! But it extends to anything that can draw significant power- and bigger transistor amps can! Imagine the peaks just... not... making it.

This taught us a lesson... when we set up an amplifier for test, we test the AC line voltage from the IEC connector. The meter on the variac (a bit of test instrumentation) cannot be trusted.

It was not an analogue versus digital, which sound better? article; but rather and article concerning why added distortion, by way of phase manipulation and harmonic enhancement/restructuring, has pleasing effect that many qualify as sounding "better".

Carlos, I realized that right away- the problem is this article is coming from someone who does not know what is possible in the world of high end audio, assuming that things can never sound real. His initial assertion that digital was such a great thing for audio... well, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the analog manipulations that he mentions in his article have appeared **as a result** of how bad digital is.

There is a definate portion of the audio community that simply does not have any idea of how good audio playback has gotten, and on top of that seems to think that anyone who does try to push the art is in fact not doing anything, because they are a complete nut. This community uses simple assumptions, like 'tubes=distortion' and other arguments we have seen here already. Tubes don't have to have any more distortion than transistor amps- I've built tube amps with THD at full power under 0.01% for example. If you use techniques that the transistor guys use to get low distortion, you can do the same or better with tubes, if you know what you are doing.

Now its a different matter as to whether or not its a **good idea** to build any amplifier with distortion that low. Here's the crux of it: any amp with distortion figures like that is likely violating a fundamental rule of human perception, which is how we perceive the volume of a sound. So in high end you see a lot of designers that build their gear to **not** make the distortions that the ear cares about, and likely are not worried about the distortions that the ear **doesn't** care about. Such equipment may not look good on paper, because the paper specs have little to do with human perceptual rules.

Tape happens to be a medium that makes very low distortions, at very low level, quite the opposite of digital, which is guilty of increased distortions at low level. Unfortunately, tape, by driving it too hard, has become an effect in the studio that is not representative of what it is capable of. Its when you drive it hard that it can pick up distortions that become audible.

Here is something that that community I mentioned does not like to hear: distortion plays a greater role in coloration than frequency response does due to how we perceive sound.

Inconveniently, the most obvious and pesky colorations to the human ear are also ones that are hard to detect with modern distortion analyzers: the 5th, 7th and 9th harmonics for starters but also the inharmonic distortions generated by digital equipment. These harmonics are percieved as harshness, the need to turn the volume down (IOW if your stereo ever sounds loud to you this is the reason why- most people never listen music anywhere near the volumes that it actually occurs in real life since their gear will get too unpleasent to be in the same room with, even if it could make the volumes) and the like.

It is true that lower ordered harmonics are perceived as warmth, and it is also true that this type of distortion will mask detail. However, it it not a failing of tape or tubes **unless you want it to**, IOW if you set out to intentionally make it so.

Bottom line is that IMO/IME digital and transistors are far more guilty of coloration than tubes or tape, and the colorations are the type that are outright unpleasant (ask any audiophile and you will find that the majority of listeners really hate excess brightness). This is not to say that they can't work, its just harder, and the transistor amps and digital gear that really do make music are few and far between.

It is also common fact that most Audiophile find equipment "clinical" or "analytical" sounding often are the same with low THD and great linearity measurements. You can arrive at the logical conclusion right????

Carlos, not to put to fine a point on it but it appears that you have not understood what I have written or did not read it. You are correct in your statement above, but its important to understand why audiophiles use these terms to describe equipment that measures like that.

Its because it uses large amounts of loop feedback. This technique, while resulting in 'high linearity' (in a broad sense) and low THD comes at a serious price: loop feedback enhances the 5th, 7th and 9th harmonics used by the ear as loudness cues (as I have at this point mentioned several times before). That this is the case is easily proven by anyone with simple test equipment.

General Electric proved about 1965 or so that humans will not tolerate even trace amounts of this distortion, as we use these harmonics as loudness cues; arguably we are more sensitive to their distortion than we are human vocal ranges.

IOW, loop feedback violates a fundamental rule of human hearing when used to get low THD and 'high linearity'.

This is why your statement is true, although the reality that underpins it seems to be counter-intuitive. It is not a convenient fact, because linearity without loop feedback is difficult to achieve. However, if you think about it, linearity on paper is not real if the ear thinks its wrong! I guarantee that if we did not have ears, we would not play with audio devices; the ears are the most important things that any audiophile has.

With regards to the previous statement:

The truth of the matter is that the only way to make digital sound like analogue is to add distortion.

You can *mimic* analog in this way but it will not **sound** like analog! This is a common myth; you cannot increase detail and improve transparency by adding distortion, because distortion will mask low level signals (masking is a rule of human hearing BTW). Digital **already** lacks low level detail. So if you were to mask details even more, the difference between the analog and thus-doctored digital is immediately apparent.

Right. The first has nothing to do with my comments as it addresses a different issue of digital gear. The second does bear some relevance and does not contradict the findings that GE made in the mid-60s.

People don't want neutral sound - just look at Audiogon posts how many people seek warm sounding gear or ask how to make sound warmer. One person started thread asking how to make sound warmer and less detailed (I advised blanket over speakers)

Kijanki, I think you are quite right about people wanting colorations. The question for me is, what is colored, what is not? Before I got into the business, that was a question that I felt needed answering. One thing I can tell you from the process that I went through is that you will not know the answer if you don't involve yourself in the recording process. Its very useful to hear live music, and then hear what the microphones hear, and finally the finished recording.

One thing I can say is this: our transducers, like mics and headphones, as well as electronics are a hellava lot better than any medium, analog or digital! They can fool jaundiced audiphiles at the drop of a hat, where neither tape, LP nor digital master file has that same ability.

Anyway, when you have a master tape from a session that you were present for, you have a valuable tool for sorting things out. Having used a variety of machines over the years, the reel to reel tapes remain, despite a great number of weaknesses, the best thing out there. A lot of the industry went digital simply because of the cost of the media; reel to reel tape can be quite expensive, especially in larger formats.

BTW I don't go for excessive warmth either- I regard it as a coloration, euphonic yes, but still a coloration (brought on by lower ordered harmonics). I just want neutral, my goal is to make it sound real, failing that as true to the original recording as possible. So far, reel to reel is a lot better at that than digital, though digital has made great inroads in the last 10 years.