I know this is an age old debate, but I need a technical explanation why one would choose tubes over solid state

[tima]

I know this is an age old debate, but I need a technical explanation why one would choose tubes over solid state

Hmmm... very odd to ask for a technical explanation of a personal choice.

When choosing audio components I have never given a higher priority to adhearance to some technical rule or specification over lifelike sonic quality.

"Although it doesn't sound as good as the alternative, I'm choosing this amplifier because it has a lower thermal noise figure."

 

[Al M.]

"Although it doesn't sound as good as the alternative, I'm choosing this amplifier because it has a lower thermal noise figure."

LOL

 

[Al M.]

Ill take the best ss over tubes Any day, better control, resolution etc etc but to each there own

System dependent. If you have difficult to drive speakers then an SS amp is the obvious choice. My PranaFidelity Dhyana speakers are very easy to drive *), and I have observed no, or at worst hardly any, difference in bass control on these speakers between my tube amp and even a class D amp with very high damping factor.

There is also no lack of resolution of my tube combo but then, the modern Octave amplification is neither syrupy nor lazy in any way, certainly not like what some traditional tube amplification, rightly or wrongly, hss been accused of.

______________

*) resistive rather than reactive load, with high impedance throughout, very shallow phase angles

 

[livinon2wheels]

You need to do some auditioning. It is not about what’s logical. It’s about what sounds good to you.

William Zane Johnson was accused nearly 50 years ago of setting the industry back 20 years by promoting tube designs. He said that he could design for best sound with either tubes or SS. But he said it was easier to do it with tubes. FWIW, the market rejected his SS offerings, but his tube based designs became legendary.

You need to personally listen. No one can explain it to you.

Yeah I get that...I have a tech background and am trying to understand why tube sound is pleasing for many people when the specs say they should be buying something else. Not throwing rocks here at anyone for their choices but trying to understand them. I have to agree though there is something about gazing on a bunch of tubes lit up...watching the tubes glow I suppose for some is like sitting and staring at a fire in the fireplace...there is no logic to it, but its enjoyable to do just the same. Maybe its embracing the whole nostalgic experience, old designs experienced in their best possible form today. It is curious to me what parts of this hobby really grab people, and tube devotion, for lack of a better term for it, is one that brings many to their knees.
I appreciate the story about Johnson, when I was going to tech school, they were still teaching tubes, but they were also teaching transistors and the early DIP integrated circuits. It was a lot to wrap your head around. But I always found tube circuits easier to understand and to troubleshoot too. So in that sense I liked tubes way more than solid state. Some of my favorite gadgets were tube based, but I remember my first exposure to stereo hifi was solid state driving AR3a speakers. This was my dad's system which had just been upgraded from a mono AR2 driven by a twenty watt tube Griefkit amp to a 35 wpc Griefkit solid state amp... to say the difference was startling is a huge understatement. And in the world of tube amps the Heath Willliamson amp was an excellent design but it couldnt hold a candle to that early SS amp. Not to my ears.

 

[Al M.]

Yeah I get that...I have a tech background and am trying to understand why tube sound is pleasing for many people when the specs say they should be buying something else.

The specs? Yeah, I have raised some skepticism about that.

 

[livinon2wheels]

System dependent. If you have difficult to drive speakers then an SS amp is the obvious choice. My PranaFidelity Dhyana speakers are very easy to drive *), and I have observed no, or at worst hardly any, difference in bass control on these speakers between my tube amp and even a class D amp with very high damping factor.

There is also no lack of resolution of my tube combo but then, the modern Octave amplification is neither syrupy nor lazy in any way, certainly not like what some traditional tube amplification, rightly or wrongly, hss been accused of.

______________

*) resistive rather than reactive load, with high impedance throughout, very shallow phase angles

Speaker choices surely do enter into making the right choice I agree.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

i own low parts count in the signal path, zero feedback, solid state amplification, and a battery powered solid state preamp. i prefer my solid state over tubes because after years of ownership and then bringing in high quality tube amps to compare for months, the low distortion and linearity at all SPL levels of my solid state is the better trade off than the little more tube magic here and there from the tube amps. and i view my solid state as sounding like music, and the tube amps i tried had a tube signature.......and when pushed the tube signature really became a prominent artifact (comparatively) in my particular system with those particular tube amps. i do like to be able to listen to big complicated music and have headroom everywhere for the music to hold together.

and my room and system is tuned enough so i don't need a tube crutch for listenability. not that that is always how it goes, but typically tubes do make it easier to find listenability. when people say they can't live with solid state, my view is what they might be saying is that they don't want to go to the trouble to (1) find the right solid state amp, and (2) to work and tune a system sufficiently to fully tame solid state. it does tend to need the acoustics and signal path very sorted out balanced and cohesive for naturalness and flow.

i view myself as a tube guy who has found a solid state amp that overall delivers enough of a tube like sound to work for me.

i do use tubes with my vinyl and tape; tube phono preamp, and tube tape repro, and love what they both do. use solid state for my digital source.

 

[tima]

...I have a tech background and am trying to understand why tube sound is pleasing for many people when the specs say they should be buying something else.

Do certain specifications guarantee preference for gear meeting those specs? Do certain specifications guarantee appealing sound?

On what basis do we judge specifications as valued? The value placed on certain specifications is itself a value judgement based on certain beliefs. How do we evaluate those value judgements and beliefs? Should turn to 'experts' who will cite more specifications?

Perhaps the notion that specs do not always predict personal preference is difficult to accept if you place a high value on the belief that specifications can tell us what is good, what sounds good. A few manufacturers will tell us "it sounds like that because ..." or "that topology can't really produce strong ..." and their answers correlate to the circuits they design or the products they make.

What you basically are asking, to my understanding, is: why do people make the choices that they do? That may be more of a market research question -- I suspect there is a lot of money spent on the psychology of buying throughout every industry. Here it makes for interesting discussion but, with respect, I doubt you'll find an answer.

 

[Al M.]

It is a fact that the speakers contribute the lions share of distortion.

And the room, especially at loud volumes. Gotta get those unwanted short-distance reflections under control with proper room treatment.

But yes, SS amp specs like super low THD are completely meaningless compared to speaker and room distortions.

Get a low-distortion speaker, too.

 

[Al M.]

It gets even more tricky when it comes to audible distortions.

1. I have found that my audiophile power cords removed a good amount of distortion from the sound that was audible with stock power cords. Even my Furutech e609 six-way power distributor removed a very substantial amount of distortion (hardness, snd even some lack of tonal color) from the sound compared to a cheap power distributor.

2. My Tambaqui DAC sounds much cleaner -- more undistorted -- than my previous Yggdrasil LIM DAC, even though the latter also featured vanishingly low distortion specs.

3. My Jay's Audio CDT3 transport sounds much cleaner than my previous Simaudio Moon 260 DT CD transport, even when jitter was thoroughly removed from the latter downstream of it. The much cleaner sound of the Jay's Audio was the most striking difference between the two CD transports from the first 10 minutes listening (super evident at the relatively loud volumes that I listen at). How can a CD transport sound distorted compared to another one? It's all just 0s and 1s at the output after all.

Apparently all the above is a matter of noise -- digital noise, AC noise etc. It all sounds like distortion.

Power amp distortion specs compared to all that? To some extent kinda meaningless.

 

[Audiohertz2]

Not one wrong post was detected , congrats WBF ..!


Carry on …

 

[microstrip]

Yeah I get that...I have a tech background and am trying to understand why tube sound is pleasing for many people when the specs say they should be buying something else. (...)

Ok,. Since you want to keep it technical, please tell us what "specs" you are exactly addressing. Then we can focus on your question.

 

[Audiohertz2]

In Audio , technicalities are subjectively laid bare to winless neutrality ..!

Then There’s Morricab …..

 

[Site7000]

I use a small tube amp because it makes me feel good. There are a couple of important things to remember with tubes. At the low levels most music is listened to (the first watt drives most speakers to 87-90 db—which is getting loud), the THD levels of tube gear is very competitive with the best SS gear. Second, the distortion spectrum is different with tubes. Focusing distortion, such as it is, on the second and third harmonic, allows tubes to mimic the distortions common in nature and mask the unpleasant higher orders of distortion.. Transistors, in contrast, usually achieve their low distortion figures by suppressing the easy ones like second and third harmonic, leaving the higher orders exposed. There are enough audiophiles who prefer the tube sound to keep a lot of talented engineers busy.

 

[Al M.]

I use a small tube amp because it makes me feel good. There are a couple of important things to remember with tubes. At the low levels most music is listened to (the first watt drives most speakers to 87-90 db—which is getting loud), the THD levels of tube gear is very competitive with the best SS gear. Second, the distortion spectrum is different with tubes. Focusing distortion, such as it is, on the second and third harmonic, allows tubes to mimic the distortions common in nature and mask the unpleasant higher orders of distortion.. Transistors, in contrast, usually achieve their low distortion figures by suppressing the easy ones like second and third harmonic, leaving the higher orders exposed. There are enough audiophiles who prefer the tube sound to keep a lot of talented engineers busy.

Yes, it is the nature of distortion that is important, not just the absolute numbers of distortion.

 

[Republicoftexas69]

I prefer SS amplifier because I listened music everyday....
If I have a amplifier with tube, I must change tubes each year I think...
But, for me , tubes amplifier has a delightful sound than SS amplifier....even if I have a Jeff Rowland Model 625....

Not true but okay.

 

[Republicoftexas69]

Due to my age I had the benefit of growing up while tube equipment was the only thing there was and then seeing solid state equipment develop and become the state of the art. I don't think that statement is hyperbole in the slightest. Here is my reasoning why I believe that SS equipment is superior in every way to tubes. In terms of pure performance, it measures better than tubes on any parameter you can pick. In terms of cost, SS wins hands down. The cost per watt even in very high end equipment is more favorable in SS. Many people it seems are taking low powered tube amps and driving high efficiency speakers with them, which kind of begs a few questions. Firstly, why would you deliberately use something that has an inherently higher noise floor (tubes) to drive a more sensitive speaker where the speaker's sensitivity can more easily reveal the shortcomings (noise floor) of the amplifier? This makes no logical sense to me. Tubes, due to the fact they run much hotter than transistors have an inherently higher thermal noise figure than SS equipment does. If the idea of hi-fi is to get as close to zero background noise and as close to having a straight wire with gain as possible, why would tube equipment even be given a second look? What am I missing here? Tubes add more hum, noise, and distortion to the signal than solid state equipment does but yet many people choose tubes? This is not even considering the huge difference in terms of maintenance costs. I just don't get it.

Simply because people prefer the sound of tubes over solid state. I myself prefer a hybrid setup and have the best of both worlds. Love when people quote maintenance cost as a detractor and there tube amps older than you still kicking it today. Can that be said of SS?

 

[Al M.]

Simply because people prefer the sound of tubes over solid state. I myself prefer a hybrid setup and have the best of both worlds. Love when people quote maintenance cost as a detractor and there tube amps older than you still kicking it today. Can that be said of SS?

Yes, I know of cases where transistors had to be replaced in SS amps and the experience of the person was not fun.

The "maintenance" issue of tube amps is a strawman. My Octave power amp even shuts itself off when a fault in a tube is detected.

 

[hi5harry]

Like some of us older audiophiles, I’ve been crazy about music for over 50 years. Back then, tubes gear DID sound better. I was sure tubes were being phased out, so I bought as many tubes that stereos commonly used. All my gear is still tubed and I have so much fun substituting my incredible stash of tubes from the 1960’s into my gear to achieve a sound that really helps my system. All this at no cost because I already own too damn many tubes. I think SS gear is also incredible now, but why change at this point!

 

[flez007]

I have lived in both worlds with more than decent amplifier topologies, there are pros and cons at both side of the spectrum - currently hooked with my DIY Baby-Ongaku Silver transformer amps leaving all measurements aside, except my ears!