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.
What does 'liquid' mean?
Valves can produce far more distortion especially at the frequency extremes than solid state, when they clip they can produce more second level harmonics, which sound pleasant, depending upon the design they may roll off both bass and treble, presenting a more 'coherent' midrange.
Keith.
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 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.
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 am not sure how music flows with ease, but mechanical edge could mean perhaps a little bit too much H/F for the listeners taste,
rolling off the treble a little usually cures this.
Keith.
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.
'liquid'could really could mean anything, if we said that we preferred a system with a slight hump centred on 120Hz and a 4dB cut at 8k
then we would all understand exactly what was meant.
Keith.
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.
