Why so many tubes?

Actually thats a great comparison, a v12 Jab vs a big block American v8. I know which one Id rather drive cross country!

A single output tube per channel is the best sound quality, each additional power tube thereafter introduces more and more audible tradeoffs.

AWD Porsche Turbo = all weather attack jet.  Displacement HP is meaningless IF ya can’t it connected to pavement….Ask those helpless Vette or Viper jockeys… Dry day might be a gunfight…

Systems engineering !

Seems like a complicated way to reproduce music

Yes, it is. It’s taking sound vibrations, storing it on a physical media, then retrieving the signal, modifying and amplifying the signal as needed to drive transducers in speakers. It’s an imperfect process, a facsimile of reality, but that’s all we got for now.

Then you have high end audio which emphasizes quality sonics which often means: lowering the noise floor, minimizing EMF and RFI interference, cleaning the AC power, minimizing distortion, shortening the signal paths, minimizing internal vibrations, controlling case vibrations, designing better circuits, using higher quality/specification parts, using cutting edge materials and techniques,...etc.

@jpwarren58

And I am open to SS to being more complicated.

You do not need to “be open to it”… just pull the lid off one, and like Rev:6 “come and see”.

There's a 50cc class of racing motorbikes. Back in the 50s and 60s it became all about how many cylinders you could get to displace only 50cc. Things got real small and because things really didn't weigh all that much revs were over 20,000! So they put a stop to it and 50cc is now limited to one cylinder.


In the audio world this would be akin to using a lot of really small tubes to make an amp but it would be a really poor analogy.

Yeah but Ralph you are Da Man with stuff like this so I have to ask, what about going the other way? Why not use one great big high power tube? The reason I ask is some guys I respect are going that way with SET and real happy with it. Of course everything else still matters too but might there some inherent advantage to using fewer tubes?