Do you prefer SS or tube? Why?
- Thread starter bluegrassphile
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crwilli
Member
I think if I lived in Florida I might favor SS as well. My room get pretty hot here Inn sC during the summer months (and its on its own HVAC System)!
atmasphere
Member
My amps are autobias so no time is spent doing adjustments. I just use the garden variety of tubes and it works great. Just switch on now and 15 minutes later everything is ready every time, although it sounds better than any transistors I've tried in far less than that. But my amps were designed to be easy on the tubes- some amps are not.
a.wayne
Active member
Ralph ,
How does your autobias differs from VAC’s ..?
How does your autobias differs from VAC’s ..?
I don't have air conditioning in my music room, and apart from cost considerations, having less heat in the summer months was a vital practical consideration for going with 4-tube stereo amp rather than with 4 + 4 tube mono blocks (even the stereo amp power is total overkill for my monitors). My 130 W/ch class A/B Octave amp definitely heats the room much less than my old 15 W/ch class A triode monoblocks did! Summer listening is so much nicer now.
Randy Myers
Active member
I agree on the SET amps. I absolutely love my Audio Mirror SET mono blocks... I do have my little T+A if I am in the mood for some SS also...
atmasphere
Member
Its probably simpler. Its a simple circuit that makes sure the tubes don't roast if the AC line voltage gets too high, and increases the bias current as the output power goes up. There is a manual DC Offset control- that takes about 3 seconds to set. The meter to do so is also an active VU meter.
Actually this is BS, simply not true.
Just check the FFT graphs of the tube amps measured in Stereophile and it's obvious that their harmonics level and order are much higher than in a low distortion SS amp. Compare them with amps from Boulder, Soulution, Audionet and Benchmark and I hope you'll stop spreading this BS that tube amps produce the good distortion and SS has the bad distortion that you've done for years.
Not to mention that all tube amps have horrible intermodulation distortion (that's the nasty distortion) compared to SS.
If you prefer the distortion of tubes, fine; but don't come up with scientific BS to justify this preference.
atmasphere
Member
Your first statement (emphasis added) here is false.
But I agree with a fair bit of what you posted. FWIW our amps tend to have very low IMD but it appears that they are very much the exception.
However, if I can draw your attention to something in the Stereophile reviews. Now I've not made an exhaustive examination, just three to be exact- the Nagra VPA amplifier, Parasound A21 and one of the Soulution amps. The Nagra and the Parasound are measured on the same ground (50Hz test tone) but the Soulution is not; its measured at 1KHz. However, the measurements support your statement very clearly as shown; but if you look at the distortion harmonics at the upper end of the Nagra and the Parasound, what we see is that the frequency at that point is only 1KHz. We also see that the Nagra has decreasing distortion components as the order increases; with the Parasound this is not the case (although overall it has lower distortion). There is a hint that above 1KHz the distortion spectra might be increasing in the Parasound. Can't tell; that's how Stereophile did it.
IOW is that to tell the whole story, the distortion spectra needs to be shown over a wider band of frequencies, not just limited to 1KHz. The Soulution got off the hook since it was measured at 1KHz and really its the higher orders with which the ear has troubles, but in just these examples we can't see what they look like when they get into the ear's most sensitive region (Fletcher-Munson). The single biggest complaint against solid state is brightness and harshness and since the ear is most sensitive at considerably higher frequencies it seems important to see how the amps might compare. I found additional amplifier measurements made by Soundstage!... We can see that Bascomb King uses a different method of quantifying his results so there really isn't an easy way to compare here. You'll note I simply said 'higher ordered harmonic distortion' but I didn't say which harmonics specifically.
I feel that I have been over-generalizing though, but your statement doesn't offer any additional substance with regards to what the difference is about. I don't accept that its just distortion as I can build a tube amp that has similarly lower distortion figures (we used to run quite a lot of feedback on our amps long ago; OTLs can have vanishingly low distortion if you run the same feedback levels that solid state amps do) and it sounds smoother than solid state so wut up?
Audioseduction
Active member
I prefer PASS 150lb Class A Mono Blocks with their detailed, organic sexy sound and with plenty of power to drive the most difficult speakers!
@atmasphere you said and repeated over the years that a priori tube amps produce less high order distortion than SS and that is the reason they sound better (your personal opinion); like a fatality in which, even if the tubes wanted to produce high order distortion, they wouldn't be able due to their nature and SS wouldn't be able to get rid or lower the high order distortion to values less than tubes due to its nature. Thats BS statement.
My opinion is that those who prefer tube amps like them exactly because they produce much more distortion (level and order wise) which adds body to the music, make's it sound organic, real, harmonicaly rich whatever. It's the same with vinyl and NOS DACs preferences.
Here are some SS amps with their 50Hz spectrum measured
and some with their 1kHz spectrum
Compare them to whatever tube amp you want.
My opinion is that those who prefer tube amps like them exactly because they produce much more distortion (level and order wise) which adds body to the music, make's it sound organic, real, harmonicaly rich whatever. It's the same with vinyl and NOS DACs preferences.
Here are some SS amps with their 50Hz spectrum measured
and some with their 1kHz spectrum
Compare them to whatever tube amp you want.
Mr Peabody
Active member
Many say it's the distortion that makes tubes sound like they do, and, I know the different amps measure differently with various distortions. Yet my unscientific mind has serious doubts that it is all distortion related.
Somehow tubes are more able to trigger some sense that a being is singing in the room. In general tubes put a more flesh on the bone feel. And, typically a more 3D like sense, you get more of an organ's body, shape, with tubes, not just notes like most SS. If distortion does this and I still hear the detail, then, distortion can't be the bad guy it's made out to be.
My theory is somehow tubes effect us in a different way of hearing. Like I can tell the difference without looking if I am in a room with a lot of reflections "live" versus a treated room. Can you feel an open doorway when walking a hall? I suspect something in tube gear is more along this line. It's like on some tube systems I get the same sense from the music as I do from another person in the room.
Now on some tube gear a brass instrument, for example, may sound more diffuse, maybe larger than it should, things like this I could accept being from some type of distortion.
At the end of the day we have to listen and choose how we want our system to playback to us. How do we want to hear it.
Somehow tubes are more able to trigger some sense that a being is singing in the room. In general tubes put a more flesh on the bone feel. And, typically a more 3D like sense, you get more of an organ's body, shape, with tubes, not just notes like most SS. If distortion does this and I still hear the detail, then, distortion can't be the bad guy it's made out to be.
My theory is somehow tubes effect us in a different way of hearing. Like I can tell the difference without looking if I am in a room with a lot of reflections "live" versus a treated room. Can you feel an open doorway when walking a hall? I suspect something in tube gear is more along this line. It's like on some tube systems I get the same sense from the music as I do from another person in the room.
Now on some tube gear a brass instrument, for example, may sound more diffuse, maybe larger than it should, things like this I could accept being from some type of distortion.
At the end of the day we have to listen and choose how we want our system to playback to us. How do we want to hear it.
At the end of the day I find the discussions sbout amp distortion to some extent misguided. Loudspeakers distort more than amps do. So do adverse room reflections. I can't believe how much perceived distortion and HF "ringing" was removed recently from my room after I installed custom ceiling diffusers (ASC). That was subsequent to other extensive room treatment.
I think the question asked in the OP is far too broad. Is the SS amp Class A or AB? Is the tube amp triode or pentode? I recently directly compared a friend's stereo pentode tube amp to my mono block Class A SS amps in my system and later that same pentode tube amp to a third friend's triode tube mono block amps. I was quite surprised by what I heard. The pentode tube amp sounded very similar in both systems and quite different from the SS Class A amps and triode tube amps while the latter two seemed to have very similar sonic characteristics in the different systems.
All of the amplifiers were able to drive the speakers to adequate levels with what seemed like low distortion, but they really sounded very different and I suspect the three listeners each preferred his own amplifier(s) to the others. I would now like to compare the SS Class A amps to the powerful tube triode amps in the same system to hear how different or similar they sound. That might also be quite surprising given the comments here about how different SS and tube amps are supposed to sound.
It is all quite fascinating and why one should probably hear a particular amp with his speakers before buying it.
All of the amplifiers were able to drive the speakers to adequate levels with what seemed like low distortion, but they really sounded very different and I suspect the three listeners each preferred his own amplifier(s) to the others. I would now like to compare the SS Class A amps to the powerful tube triode amps in the same system to hear how different or similar they sound. That might also be quite surprising given the comments here about how different SS and tube amps are supposed to sound.
It is all quite fascinating and why one should probably hear a particular amp with his speakers before buying it.
That reminds me of a blind test with a switch box that I heard demonstrated in a store in the Netherlands in the early Nineties. They demoed SS amps, a few Japanese amps and a Rotel. While all amps probably had low distortion figures on paper, they sounded radically different, and the Rotel far and away sounded the most natural. It's not just simplistically about a "topology", you have to hear an amp in your system for yourself.
It reminds me of my own blind test where the participants wore sleeping masks. They swore the tube amp was SS and the SS was tube. The comments were pretty funny.
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a.wayne
Active member
a.wayne
Active member
Most people run toobs below 1 watt at this mW level , distortion is very low , the increase in thd and IMD takes place at higher power levels ..
now ask stereophile to start showing 20 hz/20kh squarewaves and watch everyone run to the hills..
regards