@donavabdear all guitar amps are not tube. I have a Vox Essex that is SS. Prefer my tube amps but the Eessex was the first guitar amp I bought in 1976.
Tube amps and a Stradivarius
I was mixing an orchestra in a church and the conductor who was my friend wanted me to hear one of the musicians play their Stradivarius violin for me back at the mixer. The sound was so beautiful it seemed like there was already reverb on it. I was brought to tears simply because of the beauty and I'd never hear such an instrument before.
Tube amps are not technically as accurate as solid-state but they sound more musical, I would submit that they sound that way because of the ring of the tubes just like the reverb of the Stradivarius violin. I believe the vibration of the sound from the speakers excite the tubes and there is a pleasant reverb effect. In mixing vocals there is an important effect in the reverb processor called pre delay and that time delay before the reverb is actuated in the processor is like the time delay of the speakers making the tubes ring. Thoughts?
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I've always heard (and believed) that tubes sound as good as they do for 2 primary reasons: 1 - They better convey the particular harmonic structure of notes from different instruments (accuracy of tone & timbre) 2 - And very often, they overload more gracefully/less abruptly than SS devices, and the distortion byproducts sound more benign (the distortion representing more even-order harmonics and fewer odd-order ones). But that doesn't really explain the 3D effect one often gets from tubes, where each musical note sounds more tangible, real, occupying real space in a real place. For me, that is the greatest asset of tube audio: how musically realistic the sound is. |
@desktopguy Records sound better than CDs everyone knows which format is more accurate. Tubes sound better than ss everyone knows which system is more accurate. I like tubes better also. It just shows that accuracy is not more musical in this state of our technology. No one mixes up a real piano with a recording of a piano in real life, I have a beautiful Steinway B grand its a Spiro /r that plays by way of a digital engine that has 1000 levels or resolution, it plays exactly the way the original player plays it and it doesn't sound like a recording. We have a long way to go to get real accuracy.
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That would be a fantastic theory, except that tubes are just as popular with headphone aficionados as with traditional 2ch audiophiles. I definitely agree tubes are doing “something” to the sound (and I like it), but microphony is probably not its primary mechanism for this. And SS isn’t the ideal wire with gain either. |
@mulveling Headphones, yep your right. I have a set of Focal Stellia and a Naim amp that is ok but isn't as good as it is expensive I want to change to a tube amp also. Bigger amps even ss amps vibrate naturally, could it be that the natural field of the amp creates creates microphony in tube amps also? |
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