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.
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.
