Tube amps... what is so great about 'em

This is a very interesting question. I could simply argue that my tube amps make the music sound more like the real thing than any silly state amp I have heard. But that would verge on rhetoric.

I suspect the reason why I perceive my tube amps to be more faithful to the real thing is something going on between my brain and the sound, that I don't fully recognise at a conscious level. To digress for a moment, some of you may have read an article recently how researchers had studied individuals tapping their fingers along with some music. They found that the individuals adjusted the rhythm of their tapping in response to very small deviations in the beat, without being aware of doing so consciously.

I believe we often make the mistake of trying to objectify everything we hear in this hobby, at a grave risk of missing the point. If you put something on and just relax into the groove, then your system is doing something right. Your cognitive skills may never catch up with what you can learn about a system by just having a crack at enjoying the music.

This is all heresy to the objectivists - but RHUBARB to them, since musical enjoyment is the only rational measure of the value of an audio system.

I also suspect that one's choice of musical pleasure has a lot to do with your choice of amp - tubed or ss. Tubed is for those that want a feeling of the real thing and ss is for those playing the sonic equivalent of a special effects movie. Man is that going to get a backlash or what - cannot wait to see the voting results.

Dacquistot - this ramble of mine is simply to conclude with - of course you won't get it, till you have heard one, and you let yourself be swept away by the music.

Well, to start with, the only solid state amps I have heard that impressed me were the Levinson 33 Reference and Halcro DM58s (wow!!!). I have heard that the very expensive Roland 9TiHCs are excellent as well as the Accuphase. These are all reference solid state amps. There are not many below these that I could stand to listen to for any great legnth of time.

I am a tube guy and always will be. It does not mean that I could not live with any of the products above, it just means that I am willing to put up with more maintenance than someone who owns solid state. The posts above are all quite correct, there is a 3 dimensionality and harmonic texture that is not as prevalent in ss amps. Yet the ss amps have their great benefits as well, they are incredibly quiet and usually have excellent control, and of course, have no tubes to screw with :)

Good luck,
Jonathan

I liken the sound of SS to something like the old Nintendo. Single dimensional.

Tube are more like a Sony Playstation 2. Multidimensional.

Hi There,

My two cents:

I've had home and heard in other people's systems that I was quite familiar with some very good transistor gear. In some respects the best of it did some things better than my tube and tube hybrid toys. The best of solid-state seems to have a lower noise floor which allows you to more clearly make out those tiny details (chair squeeks, subway rumbles, blah, blah...). Pretty neat.

However, I've yet to hear a s.s. amplification chain flesh out the players/singers/instruments in my room the way that good tubes seem to. Everything you do hear is much more present and dimensional. Now don't get me wrong, not all tube gear gets it right. There is at least as much badly designed tubes as crappy s.s. out there. But comparing best-to-best, tubes just seem to create a more believable sense of "thereness" for me. As a result, I'm willing to put up with their idiosynchracies (heat dumped into the room, tube replacement, etc.).

Happy Trails!
Vince@Freewheel

Like Wirehead I'm a fan of space-tech labs. the most simple answer to your questiong i've ever found is written by albert on space-tech's website which i'll post below. you can read more easy-to-understand comments about tube gear at space-tech-lab.com

Q1. Why tube sounds better ?

Ans :

There are several main reasons that makes tubes sounds better , the following list out those points,

1. Tube is a much more linear device than transistor during operation.

2. Due to the highly non-linearity , conventional transistor amplifier must have very heavy NFB (negative feedback ) to make it work stablely, but tube amplifier can work well with very little or even no NFB, and heavy negative feedback is well known today as one of the main reason of poor sound quality.

3. Tube is a totally mechanical device, inside a tube is just some metal plate arrangements, the effective operation area is much much larger than a semiconductor (sometimes even 1,000,000 times larger). Almost every gold-ear audio engineer should knows , when music signal pass through a very small area, it will implies certain squeeze feeling to the signal itself and it is very audiable , so when a signal just pass through one transistor, you will immediate sense the compressed , flattened and hardened feeling from the music. The more transistors , it kills the easiness more and give your more flatness and hardness to the music.

4. Tube-amp has higher THD (total harmonic distortion) than transistor-amp by testing, but those THD created by tube-amp is all even harmonics which is very pleasant to ear and will not feel disturbing unless it is > 12% . But transistor-amp gives out odd harmonic distortions which is highly un-pleasant to human ear, by actual experiment, just 0.2% of odd harmonic distortion is audible and will create un-pleasant feelings even to un-trained ear.