Tube gear liquidity - what determines it?
- Thread starter caesar
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I have limited experience of tube amps, going from 25W/ch Audion Black Shadow 845s SETs, to current 75W/ch Nat Audio SE2SE 211s, pwring 101dB/1m eff Zu Audio Definitions 4s.
I would say the Nats are more liquid, and a lot of this is down to them having sufficient headroom to suit my spkrs played pretty loudly in a 6000 cu ft room.
If you get the amp-speakers choice wrong, a lot of that indefinable tube joy incl liquidity may disappear.
A robust pwr supply/transformer must help, the Nats being truly bulletproof wrt the Audions.
I would say the Nats are more liquid, and a lot of this is down to them having sufficient headroom to suit my spkrs played pretty loudly in a 6000 cu ft room.
If you get the amp-speakers choice wrong, a lot of that indefinable tube joy incl liquidity may disappear.
A robust pwr supply/transformer must help, the Nats being truly bulletproof wrt the Audions.
I understand liquidity to mean the experience that occurs in great systems where the soundstage feels totally detached from the drivers - ie. no sound appears to come from the drivers and the music flows with great ease and no mechanical edge.
I always took it as smoothness especially in the mid-range but no other association with drivers and such.
Perhaps remembering we can call it fluidity will help. The first time I remember reading about it was about a solid state amplifier - the original 25W Electrocompaniet. At that time this amplifier had a remarkable absence of grain in the medium and treble.
I have found it to be a system property. You do not have a component that brings liquidity to your system. But yes, some equipment can kill it completely.
I am still evaluating if the Devialet's can have liquidity.
I would hazard a guess that a well behaving bass response will help with flow as bass issues can cause the sound to be slow, disjointed, muddy. I did notice benefits from time alignment with Acourate in this respect.
Perhaps Keith but that implies that frequency response alone explains our perception of how we experience and describe the sound of a system. Of course, frequency response is very important. There are other factors at play that can explain our choice of describing aspects of a system sound. Moreover, most people, unless they are familiar with measuring gear, could describe your frequency response example. I personally can but that is because I have played so much with target curves and eq before.
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