Why don’t tube amps sound like tubes anymore?

Improved engineering

Well we listen to systems, not amps......right?!

Get a nice 6sn7 or DHT preamp and mate it with a nice pure Class A SS amp and even tube amp lovers will be pretty darn happy. You don’t need tube rectification in your preamp to have it sound wonderful or even tube like. Frankly, I greatly prefer SS bridge rectification in my tube preamp builds. Far better dynamics and bass. If the design is right you still get what tube lovers love about tubes. Examples include the Coincident DHT pre, First Sound, TRL Dude and many, many others. All sound marvelous and are SS rectified.

Use the right toned cabling and front end source and your system will sound very much like a complete tube rig.

My first thought when I read the OP was nostalgia combined with naturally diminished hearing due to age.  Then again I could be talking to a mirror!

Mark

At the beginning only two words define this hobby :High Fidelity .  Amplifiers overall are getting better SS or Tubes the good ones at least are getting closer to that simple goal: high fidelity .A good tube amp and A good tube solid state  should not sound different  when they are properly matched to adequate loudspeakers .  Speakers and amps worked together.The thing is we have been all misled with adjectives with no technical  meaning . In fact, when amplifiers get rid of their specifics distorsions they  should sound closer to each other. A good friend of mine actually a reviewer got foul many times when I made him enter my music room blindfolded  while he was always claiming that  he could make the difference right away between SS and Tube.  He kept failing the blind test.This was more than 15 years ago.  Nothing really new.  There  are numbers of amplifiers reviewers rave about because the metal work look good or because they can be used as welding machine  but not that great in  playing music .That why blind tests have been always discredited by the pundits .  Even the sweetest Beard monoblocs( 12E L84 per side  what a great amp by the way on  the Quad) were not enough to  make him guess right more than one in three.  Comparing new gear side by side in our own system ,changing one gear at a time would  clear ours minds from the refrain « BEST AMPLIFIER EVER MADE «   until next one comes for 10K more  and if it  is a tube it is likely an old design of the RCA manual revisited now.at 30k a Piece  With better cap  , better transformer or resistors very little engineering .

@mozart fan.
Well Paul, I have no experience with what you call a "JOR" integrated amp nor have I ever heard of such. I do have some with Jadis Electronics however. (Unless you are using JOR as an abbreviation for a Jadis amp? Jadis uses numbers to describe their integrateds however so I’m thrown)

Jadis, as a company, relied on a good bit of distortion to produce "beautiful music". They mostly run in class A. . One thing about Jadis if I recall correctly, is that its "source resistance" could run quite constant. Of course, much of this has to do with whatever loud speakers one is using. A Jadis, as a for instance or for any tube manufacture doing so, could never run with an ss amp to replicate tonal balance over a more complete spectrum even with similar resistive loads.

So why are most tubed amps cheaper to make? In other words with what I was trying to explain with my above blather, the "midranges" are where the magic occurs for most people and if doing that, the manufacture is saving a lot of money. Concentrate on that as an amp manufacturer, and you could sell a lot of amps.

I know of tube amps costing 150K. Price points for gear seem to go beyond materials used but in order to measure "neutral" throughout the audio spectrum, that cost money and might be actually cheaper to do with transistors. ARC comes to mind with much of their stuff in the 5 figure range even with tubes.
I am wondering if you have ever heard a single ended ss amp running in class A. As scattered a statement as what I’m about to type, single ended stuff just sounds "more correct" to me. Would be interested in what you hear in this regard.

Lou

@Mozart Fan. Oh, you were talking about the Jadis Orchestra Reference.
That’s after my time Paul so I cannot speak with any authority on this unit.
Manufacturers change their sonic signature from time to time. You now make me curious of what Jadis is offering these days.

I have heard sometime ago that the reason older tube amps sound so tubey is due to higher levels of distortion when compared to newer designs. Anyone care to agree or disagree?

I have heard sometime ago that the reason older tube amps sound so tubey is due to higher levels of distortion when compared to newer designs.

This is partially true. Its the 2nd and 3rd harmonics that are in question- together with a lack of higher ordered harmonics. Older amps tend to have a significant amount of the 5th thrown in; many newer amps do too. But some amps have less 2nd harmonic these days- if the amp is fully balanced and differential from input to output, the primary distortion component will be the 3rd due to a cubic non-linearity, whereas the 2nd results from a quadratic non-linearity. Amps based on the 3rd harmonic tend to have less distortion overall with higher orders falling off at a faster rate as the order of the harmonic increases. These types of amps simply were not in use back in the 50s and 60s.

I was thinking about this more and what I like about my amp is not that it's warm and "tubey". It's that instruments and voices have more tonal color and saturation. They are more dimensional and seem more "there". That about sums it up to me.

Moscode-...

@jond. Yeah this is what singled ended amps do for me as well whether tube or ss.
If you get the opportunity listen to the Pass stuff. I believe his I25 integrated is s.e. First set of watts run A so it does not get too hot.
Also, there’s the French company "Valvet" that also gives this impression to me and that is also an ss unit.
Tough to find however.

Maybe it's the switch to solid state rectification in the power supplies.  The old amps that used tube rectification, chokes and less capacitance had more sag, which added more warmth to the sound.

Hello, I agree with you’re opinion about most of the tube amps made today. This is happening because designers know how to make tube amps sound more accurate than the designs yrs ago. Also, many parts like capacitors made today are cleaner and better sounding. Another factor is the type of power tubes being used today in comparison to the past. There are some companies that still make musical sounding tube amps. Like Canary Audio and Consonance. For me, I still stick with power tubes I’m familiar with and are known to be musical. 300b, EL34, KT66 amps etc. 

I will say what most are thinking in the back of their minds. We all think and feel that we know what we want in sound quality but we change are minds all of the time. Hence, why this has continued to grow as a hobby. We spend so much time trying to break down the specs of what a solid state or a tube amplifier can or cannot do. We get caught up in specs of the equipment instead of what it truly sounds to us. Everyone is not the same and can’t hear the same way. If this was true, the world would be boring. Now don’t get me wrong. Education before you buy is key but don’t be fooled by specs to decide how it sounds to you. Remember this article back in August 2003 from Stereophile;

https://www.stereophile.com/content/cary-audio-design-cad-805-monoblock-power-amplifier-sam-tellig-a...

One amp measured extremely well on the test bench while the other doesn’t. “The face-off of  Subjective vsobjective. Tube vs solid-state. Retro vs modern. Monoblock vs two-channel.”

Just because technology continues to expand doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to sound better. We at some point have to stop drinking our own BS (please step away from the ledge, lol). Example: Class D amplifiers. They have been around for a while and has improved some.  Ask yourself this question for those who own subwoofers within the last 10 years. Why do those Class D amplifiers fail within 5 years? Why are they not reliable? Put away the data and enjoy the music, your music.

Just because technology continues to expand doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to sound better.

Perceptive point, especially given that "technology" includes any number of different elements -- some which have progressed much more than others in the past 10 (or whatever) years. I'm not an amp designer so I don't know which parts have had big advances, nor do I know what design innovations there have been. So, to compare "tubes" and "solid state" seems pretty hard to do without a list of which types are involved and which specific parts, too.

What? My tube amps sound like tubes. What are you using? Try using vintage tubes. Many are very affordable. My .02

It’s funny how in this modern age of technology we haven’t been able to match or even surpass the quality of yesterday’s ( NOS ) tubes. I guess that has something to do with the lack of need for high standard tubes for military and other technologies that once depended on them.

Here is one reason for the sound...

Tubes always played through "transformers" before reaching the speakers. Its the transformer that could give that lush sound. For tubes can be lightning fast when not hindered at the outputs. We were hearing a transformer effect. Transformers have gotten better in quality. The problems with old solid state have been greatly worked out. If we could hear how the old solid state stuff sounded when compare it with solid state now? You would prefer the new solid state over the old SS, like one would have preferred tubes over the old SS. That lush tube sound is unnatural and is like listening to music being played through damping fluid. The kind of fluid used to make tone arms descend slowly. Some prefer the lazy tube sound. But its far from how fast real dynamic music sounds when heard live. IMHO

Oh what a bunch of utter hogwash.

What is tube sound exactly? I've built hundreds of tube amps from scratch and I couldn't tell you what "Tube sound" is. You can make tube amps that sound great or terrible. You can make them hard and brittle or lush and boring.

If you care to and know how, you can make them sound like music.

Make them sound like tubes though, how do you do that? Why would you want to? The idea long has been to make the bits and pieces between the start and end disappear so that the music can get through. 

Let's face it, most attempts at that, tube and transistor, fail miserably.
That's why there is so much turnover in equipment on this website.

It's not the bits and pieces. Really, it's not. It's what you do with them.

Remember in the 60's, the great analytic vs romantic debate?
Which one was right? This bad sound or that bad sound?

Oh, just forget that I brought it up..   

Aries Cerat is a modern brand that does still sound like real tubes.A haven't heard better in today's tube gear.

Consider building your own SET. The design is very simple and for a few hundred dollars you can have something with all parts as good as an you get in a factory made SET costing five figures. It is not as difficult as you might think.

My longtime audio buddy Thurston has "given up" on tubes several times.  Yet, here he is, using 300B monoblocks after trying three modern Nelson Pass designs.  He pushes the envelope (mods) on his gear and things fail, generally tubes.  I like the comment that the goal is the same, so understandably, hi-end will ultimately merge.  I find they have.  Up until the Covid, my favorite combo was Thurston's Pass XA30.8 fed by an Audio Matiere Paraphrase preamplifier into large, modded corner Tannoys...in a big open space, nearfield.  He's since upgraded speakers. 

I'm about to test the waters with a Roger Modjeski (RIP) Music Reference RM10 MKII tube amp being added here to my reference NAD M2 digital amp (dac/pre).  It will be my first tube amplifier in 50 years of audio.  In addition, a new pro-gear Focusrite Clarett 4Pre USB Audio Interface now enables me to direct bass duty to my self-powered subs and above 80hZ (or so) to my sealed Salk Veracitys, taking the lower bass duties off the power amps entirely.  The Clarett additionally allows DSP work with the bass.  The goal is to reduce Doppler Effects on the monitors and tune the bass.  So far, with the M2, things are progressing nicely.  Once mastered, onto the tube amp!!  Will report in some fashion down the road, I'm certain.  More Peace, Pin.