Tubeguys:How much "tube sound" from tube players?

Oh well, here I go again bucking the system of many other posts. I have been running with tube DACs, phono stages, line stages and power amps for many years.

If I had only one link in the chain that I could put tubes, this is an easy one: the line stage. Time and time again, I can change all the other components in the system and for the most part, retain the decays, ambience, portrayal of space, etc., that I worked hard to achieve. But so far only a handful of line stages out there have come through in this way....and every one of them has been tube based. Such a unit having tubes guarantees nothing, but this is true for any tube based product.

The tube DAC or tube phono stage would be my next choices. The tube DAC brings my digital playback closer to analog like none of the multitude of solid state DACs that I have so far tried. The fullness of the piano is especially impressive. And some recent passive component updates here has dramatically improved the frequency extreme performance.

All of the above options are with tubes in enclosed chassis so they should be just as safe as SS pieces.

The power amp selection depends entirely on the speakers to be used. And this is a good place to find an amp that balances out the strengths/weaknesses in the rest of your system. I would not buy an amp soley because it has tubes or not. I feel you can get a whole lot of the tube magic in the front end.

John

Newbee's comment,

"It is probably far easier to get a SS preamp that is neutral and not subtractive, than it is to get a SS amp that will ever sound like a tube amp.",

caught my attention.

I have the CAT JL-3 mono tube amps. Each of these uses 16 6550 tubes and 3 small-signal input tubes. A Rowland ss amp sounds more tube like than these amps.

I would like to point out here that Newbee runs with THE greatest preamp from the 1980s .... the ARC SP-10. The stock SP-10 is indeed a very subtractive product, but a wizard like Steve Huntley no doubt could resolve a lot of this through many component updates. But even without such refinements, I am sure that this unit's awesome portrayal of space has everything to do with why Newbee owns this. You are not going to find this in an ss unit.....I have tried and tried with no success.

I suspect that if we dropped in any number of other tube amps from VTL, Manley, Atmasphere, etc., in place of Newbee's current tube amps, the sound might be even more rich and full and "tubelike". But if the stipulation was that we could only do this if we also replaced his SP-10 with any number of ss preamps such as ML, Pass, Classe, Klyne, etc., even the super expensive Blowtorch, you can be sure we'd see a sad sad face as we walked the SP-10 out the door. I really do not think this would be so easy to do...but who knows. And if we dropped in a more refined tube preamp like the Aesthetix Io/Callisto and ss amps like the Plinius Rowland or Gryphon here, .... well, .... , you get the point. And again, the amp/speaker interface is critical.

Foster_9: I have not heard any of the latest offerings of tube DACs or CDPs. So many Sony and Denon players are being modified with tube output stages and these are getting high praise by all that hear these.

I have been running with a Manley Ref tube DAC that uses 2 pairs of tubes. This piece brings my CD playback closer to my analog setup than any other I have yet heard. The piano especially is just magnificent. The Audio Aero in my system was a bit more refined but to me lacked that last bit of magic of the Manley.

Like many of the products from a decade ago, the Manley has some problems at the frequency extremes and the ultimate in resolution. But Steve Huntley at GNSC has recently improved this unit far beyond what I ever could have expected. This would now crush such a player like the Audio Aero. I still hope to get this running again here soon.

But even with the magic that the Manley DAC brings on, the ss DACs that I have heard here such as Counterpoint DA-10, Electrocompaniet ECD1, Muse 296 and Classe DAC1, into my Aesthetix Callisto line stage would all outperform the Manley into a ss line stage. I have no idea why this is, but the line stage continues to be THE most critical link in terms of retaining the 3-dimensional view into the performance.

John

As Tvad points out there's more than one sonic attribute that we tend to identify with tubes. One of these being a more warm midrange, i.e., greater emphasis in the lower mids to portray a richer sound from what we otherwise might identify as "neutral". This is the attribute I was referring to with the Rowland amps vs. the CATs. The CATs do not at all have this sonic character; they are very tonally coherent.

Another major attribute at play here has to do with the portrayal of space, ambience, longer decays, etc. This has been THE one thing I have chased in a system for nearly 20 years now. I find that tube preamps affect this character far far more than tube amps. I have gone through ARC Classic 60, Classic 150, VT130, Wolcott and CAT JL-3 tube amps, and the only amps here that significantly conveyed these attributes were the VT130 and Wolcott. And all of these use the 6550 tube except the Wolcott.

The VT130 was the most awesome performer in this area .... and even more so when I tried KT88 tubes. But the Classic series amps were not at all. Even the hybrid (tube input, ss output) Counterpoint NPS400 has more of this than the ARC Classic series.

Unlike the ARC Classic series, the JL-3s are never fatiguing due to an overly forward projection into the room. And with these being Class-A circuit designs, I would expect them to be more similar than different but just using 6550 tubes does not imply the resultant sound will be remotely close from one amp to another.

As for why I stay with the JL-3s with all their tubes, this is easy: I have yet to hear another amp that does the dynamic contrasts and renders the leading edge of each note like this. There is a ton of detail coming through because of the response of this amp. And when the music gets complex, the subtle details in the background do not get washed out because the power supply can't keep up.

The Aesthetix pieces do the dimensionality magic like no other I have yet experienced. But they need a little bit of help in the dynamics and frequency-extreme coverage. Some recent updates to the Io by GNSC has reduced this issue significantly, and I hope to go another round on this and then perhaps with the Callisto too. A tube amp like the VT130, Wolcotts, Atmasphere, Manley and most likely VTL, would be a little too much of a good thing for me. So I match this preamp up with an amp that does the dynamics and transients like no other. And the sheer resolution of this allows the Aesthetix magic to come right through. I tend to think of this more as a balancing act rather than synergy.

John