The greater the number of tubes in a CDP, the better the sound.

[treitz3]

Hello all, I have heard this statement from a heavy hitter in the industry. In your own experience.....would you say that this is a true statement or not?

Tom

 

[treitz3]

No sir. He states that the greater the number of tubes in a properly designed tubed CDP, the lower the noise floor.

Tom

 

[Al M.]

Hello all, I have heard this statement from a heavy hitter in the industry. In your own experience.....would you say that this is a true statement or not?

Tom

The best CD playback I have heard was from a dCS Vivaldi 4-box stack. Best tonal density and timbral accuracy and lowest noise floor, from an all solid state unit.

So no, while I love tubes (I have a tube amp myself), the statement is wrong. Once that 'heavy-hitter' builds a better unit than the dCS Vivaldi, we'll talk. Fat chance though.

By the way, the best phono preamp I have heard, the Pass XS Phono, is also SS throughout.

 

[still-one]

Hello all, I have heard this statement from a heavy hitter in the industry. In your own experience.....would you say that this is a true statement or not?

Tom

In baseball many heavy hitters also tend to strikeout alot!!

 

[TBone]

In baseball many heavy hitters also tend to strikeout alot!!

 

[esldude]

Units from Benchmark, and MSB and a few others, all solid state tend to have the least noise. Just come up with one tube unit that can equal or approach those. Too much fantasy.

 

[DonH50]

So a CD player with 100 tubes sounds better than one with two or four? Going to use tubes for the microcontroller that handles the decoding and motor control? I suspect there are some unstated boundary conditions that should be met...

I can think of some good technical reasons to have tubes at the output of the DAC, but if I were doing the design I would use a SS output buffer for better drive, and the motor control and logic would all be SS as well. Tubes have their pros and cons in power supplies but I'd probably go SS there as well though might use a tube series-pass to regulate the B+ high-voltage tube plate rail.

In the primordial past I designed and built a tube preamp using fully differential circuits. It sounded OK to me and specs were good, but several others thought it was "too SS-sounding". It had tube (cathode follower) and SS output buffers. I did find a buyer who was happy with it, paid for one semester's tuition. (Yes, this was long ago, in a galax* -- nevermind, it was this galaxy!)

 

[Audiophile Bill]

Are you sure the guy who made this statement wasn't being sarcastic - sounds like he was having a dig at digital? If someone said this to me, I would laugh and understand what he was insinuating but would not take it literally. Who is this person?

 

[treitz3]

I will refrain from who it is at this moment but he was dead serious. He had mentioned this while going over the design of one of his newly designed (at the time) phono boards and his top gear CDP.

Tom

 

[Geardaddy]

I am unsure of the noise floor bit, but its my current preference. I think "part" of the reason is that digital source material is often poor and tubes can better gloss over "a multitude of sins...." That being said, I also enjoy NOS architecture in dacs, but they also introduce their own special brand of "noise" that leaves the tech heads foaming at the mouth.