OP, “Tube sound is not about warmth. It’s about correct presentation.”
I absolutely agree. I suspect that the term warm came when solid state entered the picture as it was cold, steely, and harsh… with a compressed midrange. Warmth refers to a fully fleshed out midrange without the sound dominated by harsh trebly distortion.
Presentation. I could not agree more, well designed tube gear gets the presentation right. Solid state tends to over emphasize details, venue and bass slap. This brings up an unnatural presence of the mastering and venue. While it is exciting to hear some violinist move his foot during a performance or the London subway train rattle under the symphony hall… is this really enhancing the music? Or taking the focus off of the music.
Tubes tend to get the presentation right, get the gestalt… the core of the music right. Now some companies have pushed their tube designs to asymmetrical capture the details. But companies like Audio Research, Cary, VAC, and Conrad Johnson have remained true to getting better and better at capturing the music and keeping the presentation real. After ten years of attending all the symphony orchestra conserts in 7th row center seats I can attest to how well they do this. The violins are properly placed… not artificially dropped in my lap. Rock albums do not take the cymbals from the back… carefully integrated into the song and put them in my face. While, it can be exciting to hear this… over the musical spectrum it screws up far more music and the musical experience than it makes sound great.
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ghdprentice, excellent post. Not only because I fully agree with what you said.
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My experience with tube amps has not been better than solid state. I've liked some tube amps well enough, but I have yet to hear what it is that gets others so excited about them. In any case, I'll agree with the OP's assertion that proper presentation is what I'd want from a tube amp, and I've heard some do it just fine.
ghdprentice's description suggests that good tube amps sound plain and natural, not exciting or magical. Maybe that's what I failed to understand while listening to them. I've read so many glowing reports of some captivating, mesmerizing, transcendent effect that I expected to be wowed, when that's the opposite of what they do.
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In this hobby anything opposing tubes in general and S.S. or digital and analog or turntables to dac, or music lovers versus audiophiles , is almost more annoying than informative ...😁
The reason is simple: the quality is more in the implemented design than in the parts choices and too many factors differentiate each customers journey, and needs , and ears, system coupling , room acoustic, psycho-acoustic biases , fetischism, and knowledge etc then imposing a choice once for all for all situation is preposterous ...😁
Psycho-acoustics and acoustics rule over gear, when synergy is reached ...And rightfull mechanical and electrical embeddings controls exceed many upgrades half of the time if not more in acoustic impact ...
These rules apply for most people with limited budget not for people with no limit for audio budget ... Then my rules apply for most people who must make CHOICES and who cannot afford 500,000 bucks system and acoustically professionnally designed room ...
For example the fact that on a very costly system a costly turntable can beat AT THE END a costly dac had no useful information for most of us and our more mundane low cost choices ... It is better to have a top dac in an optimized room than a top turntable in a living room ...Too much factors are at play , it is useless to claim anything superior once for all and for all needs ...
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@mahgister +1
putting all tube amps in one basket and comparing it to single basket wit all SS designs is a little bit “incorrect sound equipment design development” representation! :-)
there are plenty of good sounding, warm (meaning linear) SS amps, incl x-fet, v-fet, darlington, class A, G etc on market. typically “warmer” sounding SS amps cost more, because devices used for output stage perform better (less distortion with less fb) at lover current, thus require more of them, matched/selected, in parallel.
warmer sounding tube amp is “easier” to build, if you have high quality matched tubes, expensive transformers, capacitors etc., which cost plenty. tube amps require more often maintenance, tube replacement, bias/bal adj. etc.
for 25 W range amp I prefer tubes, for higher power and low freq. content music I prefer SS (accuphase A, ML).
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@asctim “…good tube amps sound plain and natural, not exciting or magical.”
Let me change the gist of that a little. By being natural… and musical, they capture the magic of the music. I absolutely find good tube amps magical… they can send shivers down my back and goose bumps on my arms… it is the reality of the music, so exquisitely reproduced. Anyway… that is what I am talking about… nothing plain.
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In other words, good tube amp just sounds right, the way it should be. And that's kind of magic, yes.
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I have only owned two tubed components. One was a Prima Luna integrated amp, and I hated it and returned it. It sonically was the equivalent of pouring maple syrup over a steak.
However, my favorite preamp for the past several years is Cary Audio SLP3. This broadened the sound stage and fully fleshed out instrumental colors with sweetening everything
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And above I wasn't being entirely facetious. The perceived "liquidity" of tubes is a certain something hard to technologically dissect apparently.
“Surfing to me is like playing music. You play different melodies with different boards.” – Skip Frye
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Correct presentation is an interesting concept, and I can’t resist the temptation to make analogies to photography. If we’re going to print a photograph of a sunny beach scene, and we want it to look natural and realistic, are we just going to linearly map the light that hit the sensor on to the paper? That’s impossible without compressing everything, because the photographic paper has drastically less dynamic range capability than the real beach scene. A linear compression looks bad, so we use curves. The film in the camera develops with a curve, and the print film is also developed with a curve. If you shoot digital, curves are still used. There’s a mid-band of shades that actually track as steeply as they should, but the deeper blacks and brighter brights are compressed, so the curve typically has an "S" shape to it, flatter on both ends. This gives a "correct" presentation because of how our eye adjusts for contrast. It turns out we really don’t see that much contrast all at once. Our eyes are constantly adjusting in bright daylight, and even still we end up reaching for sunglasses because it’s more intensity than our eyes can comfortably handle. So the S curve makes the printed beach scene look realistic, with good, natural contrast. It doesn’t look compressed, even though it is. This works because our eyes automatically adjust their contrast sensitivity within limits.
With hifi it’s a little different, but there are similar limitations that have to be adjusted for to make things perceptually "correct." You could call the "S" curve in a photo distortion. Or you could call it a correction for perceptual purposes. If you don’t use the S curve in photos and just linearly compress across the entire range, the photos typically end up looking rather flat and lifeless, although detail in shadows and highlights can be excellent - at the expense of noise becoming very visible in shadows. Also if there’s any clipping in the highlights it’ll really show up and look bad. This sounds somewhat similar to the complaints people make about solid state amps. Maybe tube amps employ something similar to an S curve to make up for limits to how only two speakers can interact with our ears when trying to convey a realistic sound space, with proper tone, and also to compensate for limits inherent in recording techniques.
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asctim, this is a fascinating hypothesis. Interesting reading about photography too, though I didn't really understand everything.
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There is nothing academically superior about tube amp performance. It is less accurate than competently designed solid-state, full stop. If a solid state system sounds poor, lacking, irritating or incorrect, the most likely culprit is the speakers or the room. Tubes can go a long way in masking the weaknesses of many speakers. Most listeners would rather throw tubes at the system than address their speaker problem.
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It’s a pity that these conversations always lead to food fights. But I prefer tubes.
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Tubes can go a long way in revealing the strengths of the speakers.
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Back in the mid-80s Bob Carver challenged the writers of Stereophile Magazine that he could tweak his relatively inexpensive solid state amp to sound exactly the same as any tube amp of their choosing. The writers of Stereophile accepted the challenge and chose a highly respected and much more costly tube amp as the benchmark. The challenge would utilize a null test where a third speaker was set up to produce only the difference in sound between the two amplifiers.
At first the third speaker produced a significant amount of distortion however after a couple days of tweaking Carver had reduced the audible difference between the two to zero, even getting the golden ears of the Stereophile writers to agree he had won the challenge. Carver went on to market the new solid state amp.
This challenge has been discussed on this forum before but this thread made me think of it. The article can be read here.
The challenge got the attention of the audio community not only because Carver seemed to prove his amp could duplicate the sound of a high end tube amp, but also because it seemed to show that any high end amplifier could be replicated exactly without too much effort.
In the end, I believe there are great tube amps as well as great solid state amps and it's nice to enjoy whatever floats your boat.
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Excellent article thanks golftime...😊
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