Can you have too many tubes?

Essentialaudio,

Hey Ralph, how many tubes in a pair of MA-3s?

Too many for any sane person :-) But an audiophile's dream...they're "Iowa Class" battleship amps, fer sure!

Check 'em out Iowa Class Amps

Sirspeedy, and I respectfully disagree with you.

Whatever amount of tubes needed to do the job is how many is required. I do have solid state TV and surround amps, but there is not another piece that I can displace a tube with a solid state device.

Now admittedly, when my system begins to look like this:

Super Bad !tube system

Only THEN be time to consider changing things :^).

Mr. Porter
LOL!!! you crack me up! :-D

Thanks

paul :-)

BTW - Your system is amazing.

Albertporter, unless I am mistaken, your link is only a PARTIAL picture of the ENIAC computer completed in the autumn of 1945, and used by the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to compute ballistic trajectory tables.

By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power.

Another website states

ENIAC, with its 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches, was a monument of engineering -- and an energy hog. The city of Philadelphia reportedly experienced brown-outs when ENIAC drew power at its home at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more info see ENIAC 1 or ENIAC 2. This second link also has some interesting photos.

"Too many" can apply to transistors as well as tubes. I think the issue is the number of gain stages in the signal path, and this is quite different from the eternal argument about tubes vs transistors. With either technology I think that most agree that the less there is in the signal path, the better.

Back in the days when I used tubes there were two tubes (four stages)in the preamp (12AX7 for Phono gain and RIAA, and 12AU7 for line gain/buffer output). The power amp had one 12AU7 for gain, 1/2 another 12AU7 (?) for driver/inverter, and the two output tubes. This provided all the gain necessary, and the preamp even had tone controls. What is the purpose of having more tubes, other than to heat your house?