It will break some people's hearts to hear this perhaps, but way back in the day, around 1976, when I was at Bell Labs, we came up with a solid-state replacement for the 300Bs and other tubes used in repeaters (the word they used for an amplifier back in those days because it replaced a person who would repeat, a whole other fun story). But this solid-state replacement was called a Fetron, it used FETs and was plug compatible with the tubes. We had armies of people with asbestos gloves pulling out the hot tubes and throwing them in huge trash bins and plugging in the replacement Fetrons. We smashed 300B's by the thousands back then. Bunch of old junk! was the cry.
BTW, the repeater used to be a person's job, mostly women, they would sit in a small both and a call from say New York would come in and it could not reach Chicago with just simple copper loop so their job was to listen to what the person in New York said and repeat it into the next loop and so on until it go to Chicago, the longest loop would be maybe 100 miles. Originally the booth was 2 feet wide, just wide enough for a woman to fit into. It was a repeater bay, with little side walls to isolate the sound somewhat between repeaters. This was before electronic amplifiers.
One day, along comes an efficiency expert from HQ who figures out they can add a couple more repeater bays into the line up if you just shrunk it down by an inch to 23 inches. Then later, when electronic amplifiers came along, tube type of course, it replaced the jobs of all these women who were repeaters. Put them out of work. Later came the Fetron. But that is why bays are 23 inches wide to this day. Sort of like the old lore about railroad widths being the same as roman carriages,this was the lore passed down to me from what were the old timers then. Guess that's me now :)
Oh wow, thanks for that link!
We had the old WECO handbook on tubes with all the specs and how to make them and they were tossing them and I grabbed one. I wished I kept more of that stuff.
> their job was to listen to what the person in New York said and repeat it into the next loop and so on until it go to Chicago
Hearing this I immediately assumed that this was where the name of the game "Telephone" comes from (called "Chinese Whispers" in Commonwealth countries), but alas the article at Wikipedia doesn't suggest this.
Yeah, I think maybe that was where it came from but whenever I have searched on it for a link I get a lot of other things like radio repeaters. But it was a real thing for sure.
The term "repeater" is still used in ham radio, referring to a station that receives on one frequency and transmit everything it receives to another frequency. Usually nowadays they're a little more complex than just an amplifier though, with automated callsign callouts and internet connectivity and such.
They were pulling tubes out of what, live telephone circuit amplifiers? And what are these 23" bays nowadays, racks for equipment in telephone exchanges?
Yup, they called amplifiers repeaters and it would boost the analog signal. They would busy it out but the tubes were still hot so the glove was needed.
Tubes are still sometimes used in specialised high power applications – typically broadcast TV, or for very high power RF amps for typically either military purposes or MRI scanners (my domain!) where you really want the ability to blat tens of kW of RF at a person for a very, very short period of time.
They break. They get hot. They contain high voltages that can kill people. They're basically the definition of a nonlinear device. Yet for some reason, they're the best in their niche – if you want a tube amp that can work up to 112 kW, Eimac will sell you one [1]. Some of them come with wonderful descriptions like "The tube does not require a socket as it is designed to bolt directly to the chassis by means of the grid flange. Cathode and heater connections are made by bolting directly to the amplifier circuitry."
Solid state (GaN / IGBT) are getting there but there are still new machines with tubes in being produced today. Of course, they have to (literally) warm up and are very annoying to work with – and can kill you – but, hey, valves aren't totally dead yet…
> They're basically the definition of a nonlinear device
I don't think this is right. Triodes and pentodes have very linear operating regions. More so than a lot of solid-state devices. We make modern circuits more linear by using lots of active devices with negative feedback.
This is completely true and you're right – smaller triodes and pentodes do have a very linear operating region (Wikipedia has a nice example [1]). I believe, perhaps erroneously, that the larger, high power variants however decidedly have their "foibles" however – an example higher power curve is here [2]. There are plenty of linear operating regions. The trouble is largely that they're not going to have the same gradient!
I realise it doesn't matter that much when you've designed the amp, but in practice I have wondered about e.g. 275 µs delay times (at ~50 MHz) that may well be due to amplifier imperfect phase responses away from the frequency they were designed to work.
I built my own Bottlehead Crack tube amp [0] for listening to music with my Sennheiser headphones, and it’s absolutely delightful. It’s add such a nice warm sound. It also works on my Game Boy color to remove the annoying hum that you hear when plugging headphones directly in. Mine uses a 6080 tube, which it looks like Bottlehead has started to run out of.
It’s great to see someone spend time manufacturing things like this for such a niche hobby that’s driven by passion. I wish more companies specialized in these things. I find myself spending too much time weeding through junk on Amazon to support my niche hobbies.
Imagine how much you'd like something with less magic mojo marketing :P I worked on a bunch of Bottlehead products for a west coast audio shop during college...that they charged as much as they do for what's in there was mind-blowing.
My favorite was the "stepped attenuators" they used to sell, Rat Shack rotary switches and ten cent resistors.
That’s absolutely correct that it was overpriced. However, a large portion of the cost was the extremely high quality instruction manual for putting it all together. It was cheaper than a university course, and now I love tinkering with electronics!
You clearly know what you’re talking about, so I appreciate your input. Now that I’m more confident, my goal is to learn things at your level and understand how to assemble things more practically and at cheaper costs.
Genuinely curious - how would you go about getting the parts and building something like a Bottle head amp? I been eyeing them up for a while and think the appeal is that they package everything up nicely, like buying a Lego kit. I assumed there was a standard "audiophile mark up" which sounds like it might be higher than I thought!
(Of all the tube amps I've built the Darling is still my favorite for the sound, simplicity. The tubes were cheap enough to find — used in the radios in WWII bombers, made obsolete by solid-state and military inventory was dumped on the market. Maybe 1-Watt in power though? You might be surprised how listenable that is through full-range drivers + powered sub.)
Excellent recommendations, I'll also add if you're not in a hurry Edcor makes excellent transformers (plate, filament, combo, output, interstage). Everything's custom made when you order it though.
Hammond Manufacturing makes a lot of applicable transformers for the mid-to-lower range of hifi and they're largely stock items.
See if you have local hamfests. Tons of tube stuff there.
Remember, it doesn't need to be an audio tube to pass audio! My most-used amplifier is built around a pair of 6T9 TV Compactron tubes (basically the IC of the tube world, multiple elements in a space saving package). The circuit came out of an old GE vacuum tube manual. As long as you don't tell the electrons (or audiophiles), they'll never know!
Edcor are made in the U.S., Hammond ... in Canada? Both excellent transformers - and probably the most expensive part of the build (the tubes I use go for much less than the iron).
Yeah, that was always the hard/expensive part, building tube stuff as a kid! Most of the junk radios and TVs I scrapped for parts were AC/DC sets with no transformer.
Audiophile/audiophoolery is certainly one mark up, but stuff made on that small scale generally needs huge markup just so the company making it turns a profit
I redid a lot of their original "Foreplay" preamps for the aforementioned audio shop -- they were available as a kit option and a lot of guys butchered the assembly, apparently. Back then, the power transformer was the cheapest combo plate/filament transformer from Antique Electronic Supply, but spraypainted black. That particular transformer was being loaded at like twice its filament current rating! Little stuff like that really bothered me.
Using an illicitly acquired copy of the Crack 1 (not 1.1) manual, I quickly priced out the guts (I excluded the case, screws/nuts/washers, and wires) on tubesandmore.com + digikey.com at $184.
Assuming the basic Crack 1.1 is similar, at a price of $349, that's $165 / 90% markup for packaging up the kit for you, a nice case, and very detailed assembly instructions with lots of pictures and warnings about the dangerous parts and whatnot.
(And $96 of that $184 is for the Hammond 273AZ transformer, which I found a post saying is similar to Bottlehead's custom PT-3, but I'm not too sure about that, and I wasn't going to spend too much time figuring out the specs for the PT-3. Perhaps a better choice of transformer would significantly cut down that cost.)
As a similar small startup tube production company is Dalibor Farny who is recreating nixie tubes. Their youtube videos are phenomenal on the attempts to make a vacuumed sealed nixie tube.
Love Dalibor's work. I have the Puri clock, and it is a real statement piece that wows people. I didn't get it for that, I just got it half because I loved the aesthetic and half I wanted to support someone doing something that unique (one of those things I would personally like to do in a life after software).
On the plus side, Dalibor himself has been extremely helpful in answering questions and resolving minor issues with the clock (both software issues, both quickly resolved).
It is undoubtedly a hard to justify luxury item, but if on the fence you should buy it. It is more impressive in person than I imagined.
I came to comment about Dalibor as well - amazing youtube channel. Recommended viewing for anyone who loves home-ish-scale, high-quality manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA
He's got to be one of the world's experts on nixie tube manufacturing, at this point.
The Zen was my birthday splurge several years back. It's one of the few indulgences I didn't quickly forget about and actually have in my daily life, much less genuinely like and appreciate. No regrets.
They were somewhat cheaper back then though....
And one of the tubes is acting funny (slowly fading from the bottom), which I should probably do something about. But it seems like it's stabilized, so maybe I can keep on ignoring it!
fading at the bottom usually means the tube is leaking and will only get worse over time, so you should warranty it. fading in general (especially places other than the bottom) can also be cathode poisoning, which is reversible.
Looking into the skill, materials, manual labor, novel techniques, and quality finish that goes into it, I would argue this an expensive, but somewhat fairly priced product.
actually, millclock is also making new nixie tubes now, so they are one of the two only games in town.
nixie manufacture at a non-industrial level is pretty involved, so each tube has to pay for someone manufacturing it for several hours, and that's before you even get to material and research costs. I do wish these tubes were more affordable, but the price is unfortunately pretty understandable.
What a lot of people miss when wondering why musicians still love tubes when emulations are so good now is: Tubes amps are repairable. Something goes wrong, you can fix it with soldering irons and spare parts. Many of us are sick to death of throwing out cheap microcontroller based crap. It's a hell of a lot easier to bring some spare parts on the gig than a whole damn spare amp, and tube amps don't depreciate to garbage in five years. (Good micro-controller based stuff is a different story, but amp emulators are not built like top of the line digital equipment.)
>Tubes amps are repairable.
??? Sorry, but Tubes guitar amps are fairly unreliable creatures, especially if you are gigging musician. Don't get me wrong, they sound cool (I have Vox AC15), but they require upkeeping: tube changes, changing caps, burned parts due to heat, and a lot of modern tube amps(even reincarnations of old models) aren't well designed for the long run. See https://www.youtube.com/@psionicaudio if you are into guitar tube amp repairs.
What you probably meant to say, is that tube amps are fairly easy to service and maintain, if you have a good tech.
Generally, traditional tube amplifier circuits are much more simple than modern solid-state designs. If a tube amp breaks, you are not just going to toss it. Most tube amplifier have schematics floating around for them on the internet so anyone who might be inclined can fix one. Additionally, some HiFi designs are fairly minimalist which makes them easier to understand. Swart amps are a good example of this.
I bought a busted JCM 800 combo for $20 when I was 18. I fixed it with a soldering iron, multimeter, a copy of the schematic from ampage.com, and Forrest Mims III electronics book from radioshack.
As one who enjoys repairing gear rather than replacing it, I certainly get what you're saying. But... an entire bass head that weighs 2.5 pounds and fits in my gear bag was just too tempting, and has been utterly reliable for years. Speakers have gotten proportionately lighter too, thanks to modern magnets, though not much smaller. Granted, historical bass amps are heavier than guitar amps to begin with, and the weight savings is more appreciable.
In response to other posts about repair, high quality tube guitar amps are actually extremely reliable if not abused, and some component replacement that is done prophylactically (e.g., re-tubing and re-capping) is often unnecessary.
> What a lot of people miss when wondering why musicians still love tubes when emulations are so good now is: Tubes amps are repairable. Something goes wrong, you can fix it with soldering irons and spare parts. Many of us are sick to death of throwing out cheap microcontroller based crap
Even my 10 years old behringer junk still work, what are you buying that breaks so often than you'd consider paying 5x more vs just having a spare piece of gear ?
> (Good micro-controller based stuff is a different story, but amp emulators are not built like top of the line digital equipment.)
Can you talk a little bit about how this balances with other tradeoffs? Solid state devices should be more durable and configurable, and cheap to replace in theory.
And some parts in them should also be able to be fixed or replaced with a soldering iron and basic electronics diagnostics.
Fairly good, modern SS amp (like Boss Katana) have complex circuitry that requires a very knowledgeable tech who can diagnose and repair the issue. That can be $$$/h. Repair can cost as much as the amp.
Guitar tech amp about repairing Katana: https://youtu.be/EPvon7zLdgw
That's because the manufacturer won't provide service manuals or schematics. Probably the thing itself is not designed to be repairable, but that's an issue with the product itself, not with the technology.
exactly this, and it sucks to throw stuff out because of this. I'd rather pay twice as much for quality and not create junk and support the junk economy. I'm done throwing out gear.
Yeah but if you need to solder in a musical instrument tube amp, you can do it with a hot brick. Casual home tinker types can manage pretty OK on point-to-point stuff.
> What a lot of people miss when wondering why musicians still love tubes when emulations are so good now is: Tubes amps are repairable.
Uh, yeah, no. Tube amps are terribly unreliable and most solid-state stuff will survive being dropped off the truck. There is a reason why touring musicians are tending to use modeling amps now. They can take their Neural/Kemper/Fractal box in their carry on on a flight and grab whatever standard speaker-amp is available at the destination and be ready to go.
And maybe a tube amp is nicer--if you get the "stage queen". Unfortunately, that's less than 10% (often less than 1%) of whatever amp model you have and costs a fortune if you are ever lucky enough to bump into one probably needs an expensive amount of service work to start. Whereas your modeler is a very good approximation and you will always get it when you buy one.
I wasn't comparing with solid state, I was comparing with computer emulations for tube saturation. I have owned all of tubes, solid state, and dsp based. But I would not buy hardware emulations anymore - I just do that on general purpose computers that don't depreciate to nothing and wind up in landfill.
My point is - you buy a tube amp (or quality hardware solid state that is not a computer on a surface mount pcb that no one can repair) and you will have it for decades or sell it at close to what you paid. Not at all the case for Line 6 style stuff.
Line 6 is the bottom of the barrel in the market. The Fractal stuff holds value well, and the kemper has barely dropped in value on the used market at all.
Maybe my ears are a bit less golden or whatever, but I barely break out any of my old tube amps since getting a Kemper years and years ago
I'm going to use this comment as a good suggestion for folks reading this thread to look at Jim Lill's youtube channel. He is a down-to-earth gigging musician who goes through the scientific process to try and accurately guage what aspects of the Electric guitar chain (from strings, to body, to amp, to speaker cabinet) actually affect tone.
And spoiler alert; with a couple of flat solid-state volume boosting pedals, an EQ made on a breadboard, and cheapo amplifier he was able to basically recreate the tone of several famous amp sounds. Honestly it makes me reconsider what sort of setup I want and need personally.
I do think that tubes do give a particular overdriven characteristic that is difficult (though far from impossible) to achieve with solid-state components; I don't think it's impossible (or even difficult) to make a solid-state amp that is as good as a tube amp. Just happens that when you use SS components, it's almost always much cheaper; and it becomes harder to sell an expensive amp if your cheapest amp is almost as good. So I believe that the engineers at the big name guitar amp companies tend to give less effort and development to cheaper amps than their big siblings. Which has given SS amps a bad name.
My guess is that people are buying tubes because of the impression that they are rare and hard to get, and owning one is a privilege, which makes people accept a high price. If a domestic factory starts cranking out tubes, even with a similarly high price, the impression of rarity and unavailability won’t be there, and I suspect that people then won’t buy them.
The tubes that are currently still produced (mostly late designs for audio use) have never been particularly rare, at least until very recently. I'm pretty sure the 12AX7 has never gone out of production completely worldwide. There's several manufacturers; one in China, one in Slovakia, and one in Russia, at least. As the article notes the fact that a lot of tubes come from Russia is causing a bit of a price spike now.
But in general, since the transistors took over, they've been available for about $10 in current dollars, only a little more expensive than they were back in the 1960s. US manufacturing faded out in the 80s, but tubes were manufactured elsewhere commonly into the 90s. It's apparently still profitable to manufacture them for $10 or so, at least with legacy tube-making equipment.
The real expensive ones are like binned semiconductor parts. The best frequency response, least micro-vibrations, etc. Or manually selected pairs with similar properties. But if you just want to replace the pre-amp and don't care much they were like $12 just a couple years ago.
So I don't know what the collectors are doing, really. Not exactly a market you can corner so long as people keep burning out their tubes and multiple companies keep making them.
At least with one of the factories in Russia, Electro-Harmonix ended up buying them when they were in financial trouble, just to secure their supply of tubes. I'm sure the current situation with Russia has messed that purchase up (it was done years and years ago), but they probably still need tubes, as they have products they still manufacture that require them!
Tube amps are used in both creating music (guitar amps, bass amps, etc) and listening to music (hifi preamps, power amps, etc).
Tube amps used in creating music usually have a distinctive sound. Fender Twin Reverb and Ampeg SVT are but two of the many tube amps with a distinctive sound. Solid state amps typically have a very different sound.
Yes, there are digital amp simulators and yes they are very good nowadays. But lots of musicians want the real thing.
That may not appeal to you, and you may dismiss it, but that’s the case. People generally aren’t buying an expensive tube guitar amp because they think they’re rare - tube amps are not hard to find. They’re buying them because they like the sound.
Tubes in hifi equipment is a whole other ballgame. No comment on that one.
> They’re buying them because they like the sound.
You’re giving guitar players too much credit, they are only one step below “audiophiles” in their love for snake oil and marketing.
Tube amps persist mostly because guitar players instinctively turn their nose up at solid state, due to tubes having been the state of the art when the first generation of world famous electric guitarists was young.
Bass players are slightly better, mostly because an SVT head weighs 80 pounds and nobody wants to lug them around.
Guitar tone is built on breakup, and solid state did not break up like tubes. Not for a long time, at least - arguably FET transistors do a good job, but you still don't get the sag that a tube rectified AB amp yields when cranked.
The only reason that solid state is now catching up to tube nowadays is that:
* Front of house tech and home recording has made riding cranked amp tone live in a live environment a hassle, both technically and in terms of achieving the sounds that are being recorded
* Solid state can credibly emulate tube tone now (this has happened on things like tube compressors, too)
Having said all that, any time spent in the guitar pedal market (particularly around dirt boxes) will convince anyone that guitarists are indeed, as you say, total suckers for snake oil and marketing. :)
I use both solid state and tube amps, and for vastly different use cases. I use a small 7-watt tube amp for my studio setup, and it does has a much different feel and tone than any of my emulators or solid state amps. Although amp sims and cab IRs are getting incredibly good these days, there’s just that inimitable magical spark that tube amps have. There’s also nothing quite like a maxed tube amp, which has so-called power amp distortion.
On the other hand, tube amps are a PIA and are prone to having those delicate tubes shake their innards apart if jostled the wrong way, not to mention their backbreaking heft. Therefore I use a solid state/modeler amp on stage, because of far better reliability, weight reduction, and versatility. Now there are even pedal amps, with class D power amps built in, so guitarists need only bring their pedalboard and maybe a cab. But when it comes to recording, most studios are still gonna prefer genuine, preferably vintage, tube amps.
Nobody really gives a shit about your tone on stage anyway.
> You’re giving guitar players too much credit, they are only one step below “audiophiles” in their love for snake oil and marketing. Tube amps persist mostly because guitar players instinctively turn their nose up at solid state
I agree with you, but I think solid state amps have only been "good" for the last 5-10 years at most, which is a pretty short time to change everyone's mind, habits, and equipment. So be gentle :)
> Tube amps used in creating music usually have a distinctive sound. Fender Twin Reverb and Ampeg SVT are but two of the many tube amps with a distinctive sound. Solid state amps typically have a very different sound.
It's worth noting: The nonlinearities in the tube amps are very different from the solid-state amps. So the right thing to compare it to is one of the newer digital sims with an appropriate IR response, scanned over different input strengths to simulate the nonlinearities.
And I say this as someone with a 70s vintage Fender Twin Reverb: The emulators are really good.
I was reading a Wall Street Journal article about Taylor Swift's wealth today. The journalist pointed out something interesting, one of the biggest sources of income for Taylor Swift is vinyl record sales. She sold close to a 1,000,000 vinyl records of the Midnights album in 2022 each costing around $27. Moreover, vinyl record sales have increased year over year for the past 17 years. I suspect that the people who are purchasing Taylor Swift vinyl records might also be interested in purchasing vacuum tube preamps.
I know a bunch of teenage kids who buy vinyl. They get them for the atheistics and as a objet d'art, and tend to listen to the music more via spotify than using the vinyl.
> If a domestic factory starts cranking out tubes, even with a similarly high price, the impression of rarity and unavailability won’t be there, and I suspect that people then won’t buy them.
I expect that would improve tube sales, rather dramatically. Lower priced, high quality tubes, made without slave labor or something near it, and with actual quality control? That would be rather popular in many circles.
I'm aware it's an unpopular thing to point out on HN, but we are very much in the middle of a vinyl resurgence, with LPs having drastically outsold CDs in 2022, and showing no signs of slowing down. Make fun of it however you want, but there's very strong interest right now in analog, non-digital, non-consumer-tech, non-tracked-and-data-collection sound. Tubes go well with that, and quite a few high end audio vendors these days have various tube amps in addition to their semiconductor based amps.
It seems a good place to be, and I wish him the best of luck with it - I may have to see if I can acquire a set or two down the road when prices drop a bit.
>but there's very strong interest right now in analog, non-digital, non-consumer-tech, non-tracked-and-data-collection sound
I appreciate your attempt to explain the phenomenon, but unpicking your words I don't find myself much wiser. CDs are not tracked or data-collected either. Vinyl players are every bit as much "consumer tech" as CD players. As for "analog" and "non-digital, they mean the same thing - but why should they be in demand? They sound worse. And before you say "it's not about the sound", sure, but even for intangible "souvenir" value, the only disadvantage a CD has over a vinyl record is that it's smaller. And surely it's at least a little bit about the sound? After all, they're not buying empty covers.
drastically outselling physical CDs in an age of digital download is not really a claim to fame. I'm sure a lot more buggy whips and buggies are sold than steam cars.
I wasn't writing off vinyl (and I've seen the news that it's increasing), I was just saying that comparing it to CDs was failing to land a punch. And my "buggy whips/steam cars" analogy was spot on.
ever notice how after a destructive tornado they say "it looks like a bomb went off", and after a bomb goes off they say "it's like a tornado blew through here". Not the same situation as the CDs, but the same in that my brain says "wait a minute..." and if you want to impress the listener, you don't want them thinking "now holup"
I don't know that that's quite it, people like them because they have a different sound. Objectively speaking, they do a worse job of recreating audio, but they do it in a consistent way that people like.
If people only liked the sound, I would assume that it could be emulated on the digital sound processing platform they already use. People buying tubes must be something else.
Although to be fair, most of the time “liking the sound” is indeed just due to quirks of the analog implementations, like eq cramping. Those differences were emulated long ago, and producers often do reach for a “colored” emulation instead of the “ideal” digital filter.
Check out the video. Harmonics above Nyquist can still reflect back into the audible range.
About phasing issues, it is not usually the path-difference between your two ears, but harmonic interference due to mixing the phased signals, which cancels out desirable frequencies.
Although I do have another excellent Dan Worrall video for you, about the ears thing: https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8
There are many many digital tube amp emulations and they are widely used.
But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on.
There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse.
I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work.
Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.
Your comment made me think of Jim Lill, a professional guitar player out of Nashville. He has a whole YouTube series where he tries to figure out where guitar tone comes from.
I figured his youtube series would show up here. Take my Upvote.
I'm now of the strong opinion that there is NO need for tubes any more, unless you've got old gear you want to keep working, and are willing to fork over the money for the tubes, and the power they waste as heat.
It makes me sad, I've been learning how to repair old tube ham gear (Collins, et al) from a friend who's been doing it since he was a kid in the 1950s. I've learned to have strong contempt for silver mica capacitors, and a reverence for the silence of modern non-dynamotor power supplies.
The strangest case was the RF amplifier that didn't work... because the ground lug the grid was connected to, wasn't a good ground.
That magical thinking only works, though, if the object in question is special in some way. If it can be had for a dime a dozen at any time from any local corner store, the object loses its magic.
Exactly my point. If tubes still were, and always had been, a dime a dozen, then nobody would care about building (or buying) fancy expensive equipment with tubes! Tubes would be seen as obsolete junk.
“Warm tone” is just another name for gentler distortion, where non-linearities happen before the hard clip limit. It can be modeled pretty well digitally as long as the digital signal itself doesn’t clip, but I agree the real thing is best.
LOL, what? Tubes produce the distortion you hear in most branches of heavy metal, and iconic sounds throughout the whole spectrum of guitar rock.
In its raw form, it sounds awful; it has to be carefully shaped by filters, to remove high frequency "fizz" as well as annoying midrange frequencies to which the ear is sensitive. Even then, that filtered tone isn't something you could listen to via hi-fi equipment or record directly; it is amplified into certain kinds of cabinets with certain kinds of speakers. After all that, some people still hate it. :)
Not really, and it isn't just warmth. The distortion is a unique pattern of simple and monotonically decaying series of harmonics, dominated by moderate levels of second harmonic. This is probably why most find it pleasing.
I think you're talking about very small amounts of it there. As the tube circuit goes into deeper saturation with more gain, it quickly becomes very brittle and displeasing. What keeps the harmonics moderate is low-pass filtering.
I love my tube stereo. It would take an expensive solid-state amp to get close to its character, and it glows like a little fireplace :)
Side note - I have a hunch that the term “warm” was coined unconsciously. It’s not the actual sound; it’s the sound characteristic of warm glowing tubes, the sound of electricity fizzing through hot metal.
For a few hundred bucks, second hand, I can get a distortion-free sound-reinforcement amplifier, that can pump something like 600W per channel into a 4 Ohm load.
The equivalent all tube amp would require a line of credit from the bank, and would need to be on wheels.
To inject pleasing tube distortion into it, which I could turn on and off easily, I could put two inexpensive tube pedals in front of its inputs, like these:
My stereo is 15 watts (through the tubes, but still) - RIP your ears. Agreed that circuits in the preamp stage make the vast majority of the difference.
I like analog hardware mostly because of the knobs, but there is also a nice spiritual connection to the sound energy.
Note that a solid-state amp can still be analog, transistors vs. tubes is distinct from analog vs. digital. Analog solid-state amps can make fantastic sounds, but transistors are much better at staying linear until they clip, so the transitions to nonlinearity/distortion are abrupt and the crunchy tone is less “warm”.
Rarity is one aspect that can summon that talismanic belief, but not the only one. There are lots of guitarists who have an abiding love of Stratocasters despite them being the Wonder Bread of guitars. What they have instead is a connection to history and other shamanic players: many famous guitarists have played strats, so even though your strat isn't the one Stevie Ray Vaughan played, it is sort of the same species in the underlying animistic magical thinking.
With tubes, I think would hold even if the tubes themselves became cheap as chips.
Time is another one: simply using the same piece of gear for years can imbue it with the power of ritual. Many writers use the same kind of paper and pen, and sit at the same sea, and the repetition alone is enough to summon the write mental state.
It's possible it's just pure nostalgia on my part I guess, but my experience is that 1950's to 70's music sounds better on a tube amp. I'm speculating that the music was mixed for tubes -- and they wanted the warm sound of the tube to come through. So the sound was mastered for the imprecise tube amps of the time.
Many solid state guitar amps are made by the tube amp companies, who have a vested interest in treating those models as entry-level stuff from which the real pro is supposed to upgrade to the inconvenient tube stuff.
The mistake with most solid state guitar amps is that they have similar wattages to tube amps. At
stage volumes, it's easy for a measly 50 or 100W thing to go into clipping.
If you want solid-state guitar amplification, skip guitar amps and use a high wattage power amp used for sound reinforcement. E.g. something that puts out like 800W or more into a 4 Ohm load. This will have the headroom not to crap out when competing with the other guitarist's 100W head.
Not only that, but it will cost you less $$$ (particularly in the second hand market), and likely weigh less than your friend's 100W tube head.
Solid state guitar amps from guitar amp companies are snake oil, basically. They are not representative of what you can do with solid state.
Did you know Eddie Van Halen used solid state amps? One thing he did was to use a Marhsall tube amp head as a giant guitar pre-amp: capture the speaker output, reduced to line level, and re-amplify with a power amp, like a H&H V800.
I haven’t been able to tell the difference for a while. I switched from a Marshal JTM45 to an Axe FX III w/ a big FR/FR cab and it sounds damn good and is a lot more flexible.
The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less.
Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
Yeah, hard for me to wrap my head around why you would throw high speed digital circuitry, DSPs, and complex algorithms into a box to try and emulate the sound that a simple heated cathode in an evacuated glass tube can produce. $24 can still get you a decent 12AX7, I believe.
Modern digital sound processing allows the flawless recreation of a piano, and even to create an instrument with qualities no piano built in the old style could have. Everything, and more. Cheaper, probably portable, and it doesn't require tuning. In fact, most people who play the piano now play on such instruments, most of the time.
Yet some people still buy actual pianos. Because there's an art and craft and history to pianos, and they're majestic, slightly intimidating machines; and they're expensive status symbols. A tube amp for a guitar is much the same.
Yes, because pianos are still viewed as special, which is in turn because they are expensive to buy, hard to transport, take up a lot of space, and requires regular service (tuning). But tubes lack (or could potentially be made to lack) all of these qualities, which is why it would be risky to try to make tubes more cheaply available.
A tube amplifier made in the style of mid-20th century ones is expensive, hard to transport, bulky, and requires regular tuning/maintenance (when compared to a solid-state device). Like you say, that's why people still buy and make them.
How fortunate, then, that 99.9% of all piano music heard is going through an amp and a pair of ordinary speakers!
I've made it a point to attend classical music concerts, and even I think that 0.1% might be pushing it when it comes to the piano sounds I've heard in a room.
I've got nice flat-response studio monitors so I could get a close enough room sound if I wanted (not that I could play a piano worth a damn in order to do that LOL). Honestly they weren't particularly expensive. Certainly less expensive than a single piano tuning!
A piano is a 3D object; it has long, vibrating string courses, and a large sound board. When you're playing a piano, sound is coming at your head from various angles. It changes depending on how you turn/move your head.
All of that is condensed into a single voltage signal and sent to a speaker.
A speaker is also a 3D object; it has various modes of vibration. With multiple speakers in a cabinet (even with just a mono signal, not talking about stereo), and reflections from walls and so on, you can hear different things in the 3D space.
These are not related; the speaker cabinet just won't reproduce the experience of playing a piano, or being right next to one. It reproduces its own sonic 3D signature.
Now if you're listening to a piano from a distance in a big hall, some of this matters less. Your head movements don't make much of a difference; it's almost just coming from a single point that could be represented by a single point source (one mic capture), panned into a stereo sound stage.
However: 99.9% of all piano music heard is not heard through a live piano directly. Make that several more nines if you're talking about someone who doesn't even play piano and occasionally hears something in a huge audience hall. It's heard recorded, and then played through a speaker.
Then let's say I want to play. If I'm trying to match something I've heard, it doesn't even make sense to take that physical piano into account. What I heard was a recording. I lose nothing by playing it out of a speaker.
If I want to play just for the joy of playing a physical object or something, that's a different story. But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that, the speaker loses nothing. And best of all? It's light and cheap!
> However: 99.9% of all piano music heard is not heard through a live piano directly.
That's obviously false for the individual who is a life-long, dedicated pianist, who listens to the piano in front of him or her for hours, daily, more than any other piano.
They would be short-changed by some piano synthesizer patch coming out of a pair of speakers.
> But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that,
In particular: the purpose of creating a quality recorded sound without the hassle of an acoustic space, with excellent microphones, placed expertly, going into quality preamps, and all that.
Synthesized and modeled sound makes it easier to produce (or fake, depending on your viewpoint) quality recorded music.
OP is clearly referencing the sum of all people who listen to a piano in a song. Not the "life-long, dedicated pianist"'s of the world. And to further that point, lots and lots of folks who play in touring bands do not haul a piano with them. They're usually using something like a Nord Stage.
Maybe, but analog components can really "color" audio. Filtering, resonance, ringing, slew- when you have devices that respond slowly and nonlinearly to DC voltage you get all sorts of effects on an AC signal. The most reliable way to reproduce the way a component affects the sound is just to use that component. Also... they look cool.
There are different applications for tubes. Snobefest audiophoolery will complain they are "not like the originals", but people buying them for nice distorted guitar sound will be entirely fine with it.
The impression of rarity? They are expensive because of actual rarity.
These things are highly labor intensive to make and producing tubes with a consistent level of quality requires extreme attention to parts tolerances and procedure. Do you buy tubes or are you just opining on something you have no experience with? I would kill to be able to get a pair of good 300Bs for 100$
Guitar players and hifi folks have been buying and using tubes since before they became popular and obsolete enough to be scarce and expensive. I’ve seen more than a few voice the complaint that they can’t find good tubes for under a buck at goodwill and garage sales anymore.
Whitener's Western Electric website has a Technical Library section with some marvelous preserved historical documents. For example The Principles of Electron Tubes which describes traveling wave tubes, klystrons, and other devices still used extensively today. The Statistical Quality Control Handbook is still worth a read. https://www.westernelectric.com/library#technical
I love my stereo tube amps and preamp. Not only does my system sound wonderful but I love tubes as objects themselves. These are the original electronics and I nerd out using them. Recently I got some 12j5gt tubes made by National Union. They were made for the military (Joint Army Navy, JAN) and had the date October 1942 on the boxes. I got a bit of a thrill out of the idea I was the first person in 80 years to see these. Call it nostalgia or whatever but actually using 80 year old electronics is just fun.
Most of the tubes that have become expensive are the ones that guitarists swear by. GEC KT66 and KT88 along with Mullard EL34 have surged in value as the supply has dried up. In the audio world the most expensive tubes are the 300B and especially the original 300A triodes. While Americans were in the process of throwing out and destroying the old Western Electric tubes, Japanese audiophiles started buying them up starting in the 80s. A tremendous number of the existing vintage WE tubes are now there and in China. The current version of the Western Electric 300b tubes have a very good reputation but there are other boutique manufacturers in Germany and Japan that also make highly regarded versions.
I own 400+ tubes. Like I said, I like them for their history and as amazing objects. I don’t own any really expensive ones but I have had fun finding alternative tubes for my equipment that are less expensive but have the same sonics as the more expensive ones. For example I can use tubes with heater voltages other than the common 6v. I have also done things like use a pentode tube converted to a triode. Lots of fun and it sounds amazing.
The thing with that is, it's way cheaper to use what already exists. The "we need new CRTs" thing seems to come up all the time, when the reality is they're still readily available as long as you're not depending on them being free and/or available right this second at a retail location near you.
Same reason we (Glitch Works) haven't done a new 8-bit ISA Ethernet board. They're still available for $5-20 basically any time you want one.
I think the tube infrastructure is a bit harder than the physical tube.
You might be able to get, say, a VGA monitor but need to hook up a composite-only console, and that means a hairball of adaptors and converters.
I could see some merit in a generic "chassis" kit-- it would have all the important inputs and geometry controls, but be buildable to drive a range of common picture tubes salvaged from old monitors and TVs. Might even be a chance to upcycle TVs and monitors where the original chassis was crappy and unreliable.
Generic chassis are available on aliexpress. Reviews I've seen aren't great... It seems to be better to repair the existing chassis if possible, than to use these, but there's not always an existing chassis, so.
I've been looking into this.
Apparently it's a lot more complex.
1. Couldn't be made at scale now due to regulations around the lead.
2. Seems like a lot of the knowledge is lost too.
I found a factory on alibaba who can manufacture Crts with new old stock tubes, but their minimum order quantity is 500 and who knows what the quality would be like.
Couldn't get them to do a "sample run" of 10 for me either
Wikipedia links a page from "Springer Handbook of Glass" [0], which shows a diagram of the typical construction of a CRT tube. The lead glass is only used for the sides and back, with barium+strontium glass used for the front. It looks like use of lead glass is only a cost optimization, and the whole thing could be made from barium+strontium glass. As there is no other technology that matches CRT latency and motion quality when used with fixed 60Hz content (e.g. most console/arcade games), it should be possible to sell new CRTs at high enough price to make this viable.
Eimac, founded before WW2 but now some division of some corp, is the gold standard for amateur radio amplifier tubes and is still used by governments. They developed technical advantages while making a lot of radar tubes during the war and amateurs scooped up the surplus and later became regular customers and then commercial suppliers like Collins designed them in. They were part of Varian for a while and make modern very high power klystrons among other things.
I learned that you can just buy nixie power supplies and adjust them to the strike voltage of the tube, which is a bit nicer than the custom circuit I linked. but be careful- you're either dealing with mains voltages or high DC voltage, both of which can be pretty painful if you make a mistake.
“Tubes just distort things in a very pleasant way,”
This is probably the best description of tube sound. Not that they don't distort, just that humans seem to like it when they do. If you A/B tube and solidstate amps at a level where neither is driven into distortion, they're hard to differentiate.
I really enjoyed learning electronics through tube amps. But gee howdy are we better off not having big filter caps and badly grounded All American Fives around.
The guitar guys are A/B testing their way toward modeling. I guess that leaves the Hi Fi guys. Nothing against fetishism or historical reenactment, but I'm not sure that's leaving much.
I play guitar thorugh an ADA MP-1 MIDI-programmable tube pre-amp.
All the clean presets I use go through the solid-state signal path; no tubes.
That shows you where I stand.
Tubes are for the blatant distortion everyone can objectively hear. That effect is so undeniable that all the modern digital modeling equipment purposefully reproduces it, using specific amplifier names in the settings.
(Why can't that modeling shit come up with something original and leave the tubing to the tubes? Hundreds of millions of transistors switching in two voltage levels, to simulate an evacuated glass bottle with a couple of electrodes. That's like using Postgress DB to construct a thread mutex. Abstraction Inversion: http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html)
> (Why can't that modeling shit come up with something original and leave the tubing to the tubes? Hundreds of millions of transistors switching in two voltage levels, to simulate an evacuated glass bottle with a couple of electrodes. That's like using Postgress DB to construct a thread mutex. Abstraction Inversion: http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html)
There are plenty of VST waveshapers. Just...everybody wants to use them to reproduce tube amps and pedals instead of different distortion ideas. Hell, personally I can't even hear the difference between whatever different models of distortion people come up with anyway...
E.g. people dig the usability and reliability of Microsoft Windows, but other operating systems are still used at least for shits and giggles, right?
I've not heard of anyone using anything other than tube amp models. Either that, or going to a guitar synth with a MIDI pickup to make it into a clarinet.
I have an algo based on some transforms that I coded back in the day for a university project, nothing whatsoever to do with tubes. Been meaning to parameterize it and run some guitar sounds through it. I'd bet it sound awesome.
BTW, the repeater used to be a person's job, mostly women, they would sit in a small both and a call from say New York would come in and it could not reach Chicago with just simple copper loop so their job was to listen to what the person in New York said and repeat it into the next loop and so on until it go to Chicago, the longest loop would be maybe 100 miles. Originally the booth was 2 feet wide, just wide enough for a woman to fit into. It was a repeater bay, with little side walls to isolate the sound somewhat between repeaters. This was before electronic amplifiers.
One day, along comes an efficiency expert from HQ who figures out they can add a couple more repeater bays into the line up if you just shrunk it down by an inch to 23 inches. Then later, when electronic amplifiers came along, tube type of course, it replaced the jobs of all these women who were repeaters. Put them out of work. Later came the Fetron. But that is why bays are 23 inches wide to this day. Sort of like the old lore about railroad widths being the same as roman carriages,this was the lore passed down to me from what were the old timers then. Guess that's me now :)