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Tube amps and a Stradivarius

I was mixing an orchestra in a church and the conductor who was my friend wanted me to hear one of the musicians play their Stradivarius violin for me back at the mixer. The sound was so beautiful it seemed like there was already reverb on it. I was brought to tears simply because of the beauty and I'd never hear such an instrument before.

Tube amps are not technically as accurate as solid-state but they sound more musical, I would submit that they sound that way because of the ring of the tubes just like the reverb of the Stradivarius violin. I believe the vibration of the sound from the speakers excite the tubes and there is a pleasant reverb effect. In mixing vocals there is an important effect in the reverb processor called pre delay and that time delay before the reverb is actuated in the processor is like the time delay of the speakers making the tubes ring. Thoughts?

128x128donavabdear

Showing 2 responses by mulveling

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
1,774 posts
 

That would be a fantastic theory, except that tubes are just as popular with headphone aficionados as with traditional 2ch audiophiles. I definitely agree tubes are doing “something” to the sound (and I like it), but microphony is probably not its primary mechanism for this. And SS isn’t the ideal wire with gain either. 

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
1,774 posts
 

@donavabdear

You’re right, self noise cannot be completely ignored. Some even advocate high-end isolation stands like HRS or Critical Mass for headphone amps. However, in my experience while isolation has made a big difference for my turntable & speaker setup, it’s not so much for my headphone setup. I have a very high end T2 electrostatic amplifier (massive tubes & SS hybrid, quad of EL34 and quad of 6922 plus a ton of OOP high voltage silicon), and quite honestly hear no meaningful difference between it on or off a Critical Mass Black Platinum shelf.

Maybe of impact in some cases - but for most cases, the self-noise energy will be a few orders of magnitude below the energy received from some big nearby speakers. But then, who knows - maybe it’s a bigger deal than I’m giving credit to. CMS would probably say I really need their new CenterStage feet (in addition to the shelf) to help defeat self-noise. But feet that purportedly required hundreds of hours burn in (sounding BAD for a lot of the lead-up to that) are just a no-go for me.

I borrowed a Stellia and liked some aspects of its sound, but it’s a bit too bright for me with SS amps. I liked the Utopia better - that headphone also sounded quite good right out of a Naim integrated amp.

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