Tubes Do It -- Transistors Don't.

Greg has made the best point in the old tubes vs ss issue. "unless you can spend mega$ on ss, the musicality will always be a little wanting, hidden". He is saying that tubes offer a dimension to the music that ss partly misses. Thus ss sound may possibily have a tad of boredom (fatigue) after a few months. Tubes give texture, but a slight drawback in the extreme fq's. But have to say the little Jadis delivers a nice bass-punch.

Asa, thanks for the compliment about my writing skills. I accept that under protest because I think visually and writing is something of a disjunct from my real life. Don't presume that I am a duck out of water concerning myth and science, though, by reading my posts in an audio forum. Nuff said.

In your last post, you finally touched ground; something I can set my teeth into. I agree with you on the necessity of tubes. I will also agree that ss (I formally disdainly ID as SS) sounds less real than tubes. I loved my all tube setup. I converted a number of ss users over to tubes.

There was one thing missing though. One thing I knew was in my way of a believable stage image. One I knew was attainable based on my memory of the perfect audio moment fifteen years ago. The problem was the sound stretched from speaker to speaker. I can only think that is what you mean by air, Asa. I don't buy your definition. I want the performance to live on its own, divorced from speakers, sort of like fusion reaction suspended in a magnetic force field.

When I first witnessed Apogee magic fifteen years ago, I literally walked around the speakers - still I did not believe the music was connected to them. None the less, my perception of the piano and it's player was one within space, a room. This was due, no doubt, to the recital recording being made live, with all the natural reverberations, subtle as they are, carving out the confined space of a room.

Mind you, this whole image was due to the marriage of many factors: The live stage recording, a fine amp, glorious dipole speakers, and pristine vinyl.

Most music production is not so innocent. I won't go into that, as I am sure everyone knows studio works are as real as pictures of airbrushed centerfolds, after they get finished working it.

Asa, I don't hear you qualifying your music with air, except to say that it exists even in a noiseless room. You make no distinction between live events and manufactured events. I contend, you are merely perceiving noise floor.

The Pass is the cleanest ss around. That I know from my own wide experience. I can verify that with testimony from dependable sources, not reviewers. The ss difficulties you enumerated are minimized nearly completely. One gains dynamic range, simplicity, bass control and most important to me, very low noise floor. As I have written, placing tubes before the Pass forcefully tunes it's performance. Just the other day, a friend who is familiar with my audio journey, listening to my Sylvania tube substitution, exclaimed all dryness was gone. This particular tube's magic breathed life into voices and made high hats shimmer without loosing body and dynamics.

The cd media necessitates tubes. Vinyl is even better.

Unsound, this child wasn't foolish,only naiv, like a music lover amongst audiophiles and ASA, Buddha on the road to Damascus????--he must have been walking in his sleep---
6chac, how are you going to have the trolls? Broiled or steamed? Cheers,

Roast Detlof, roast...LOL

6chac, don't be a pest. If you have an opinion that is contrary to someone else's, state it with reasons. When you just say someone is wrong, over and over, it just makes me think you don't know why but want to make us think that you do, as if discussing it with us is somehow beneath you. It just makes me feel, in your safe room of anonymity, that you really don't have any reasons.

Mural. We will have to agree to disagree on Pass SS at this point. If you are happy, then I am happy for you. On air, all sound is projected, whether "real" or "manufactured" - which is still "real" ie no phenomena is outside "reality". If you mean studio vs. live, then yes, many studio productions create voids in their presentation between players. I tend heavily towards live recordings myself. Second, when I say "projected" that doesn't mean, implicitly, that any projection must be bound to the speaker plane, thus collapsing and bounding the soundfield while, concurrently, drawing our mind to the speaker face. You can have the simulcrum of a projected soundwave without that aural "image" being stuck on the speaker plane - just like live music, and which, again, is what tubes excel at.

"Noise floor" can impart the sensation of dimension and air (since, assumably, you would want that because sound in our atmosphere always moves within dimension containing "air", which is what atmosphere means, and why I used the term) or you can have a void (the sterile "blackness" that many refer to). "Black", a metaphoric visual term, is used to describe the absesne of sound from a reductionist perspective, ie it is the absense of light. Space is not to be characterized as if the source is "light" and the space is "black". Psychologically speaking, that choice in metaphor is symptomatic of a subtle relegation of sound projection vs. considerations of space - which, um, was what I've been talking about...

On "I can verify this [cleaness of Pass] from various sources, not reviewers", I would humbly suggest that you are the best source for yourself; looking to others is still subtle conformism, just like looking to reviewers for your senses of security. Verifica-tion begins and ends with yourself, that is the widest experience. But again, if you are happy with what you hear and others tell you they hear from Pass, then I am happy for you.

Yesterday, I was playing tennis at high school courts when the marching band started by to the football field for their practice. A blare came out of a trumpet, the boy kidding around. It wasn't musically consonant, but it was existentially so, because, well, it was "real". Tubes mimic this real-ness to a greater degree than SS, but I've never heard a stereo - tube or SS - that even came close to its real-ness.

Time to go listen to some music....