Why so many tubes?

Why they have so many tubes and why their prices are (excessively) high?

One would think after 117 years of evolution (1904, invention of the vacuum tube) and with only 4 other components involved (R, C, L, transformer) engineers would have reached the optimal configuration for a tube amplifier by now.

But there’s another ’science’ involved. It’s called Marketing ... the art of tempting people to spend top dollar.

^All good there^

There use to be horns and large woofers like 18” (or maybe more) at 16 ohms, and 10-15W tube amps.
Then we got direct radiators, and the work of Theil-n-Small… and later a bunch of low impedance drivers. Like Texton says, “4 Ohm drivers are better”.
But also listening levels have probably also jumped 5-10 dB. I do not recall hearing other peoples music in my youth, unless it was a Ghetto Blaster. Now you hop on most any tram, and every ear bid sounds clear enough to make out the song.

Well the connection between the number of tubes and marketing is ridiculous. The number of tubes has a direct relationship with the output power of amplifiers and then the particular design philosophy of the engineer with preamps and similar. I always view an increased number of tubes as a negative and yet I own Atma-sphere OTLs because the efficacy of this design has been demonstrated through listening. It is a superior design and one of the factors that makes it better requires more tubes than the more traditional. 

One would think after 117 years of evolution (1904, invention of the vacuum tube) and with only 4 other components involved (R, C, L, transformer) engineers would have reached the optimal configuration for a tube amplifier by now.

when did they invent the cow?

would think they'd have figured out the optimal configuration for cooking a steak by now...

One would think after 117 years of evolution (1904, invention of the vacuum tube) and with only 4 other components involved (R, C, L, transformer) engineers would have reached the optimal configuration for a tube amplifier by now.

But there’s another ’science’ involved. It’s called Marketing ... the art of tempting people to spend top dollar.

Ya- you'd think. They've been making automatic transmissions for a while too, and yet they still fail in the middle of nowhere.


There are actually innovations still occurring with vacuum tube amplifier tech (I can call out a couple of patent numbers if you like). Electrolytic caps keep getting better- and the better they get, the more effectively you can bypass a power supply. Plus we have computer modelling now so you can simulate and optimize circuits (including tube circuits) better than you could back in the days of slide rules.

Reminds me of a midnight trip with a buddy to visit the transmitter building at KCMO AM in Kansas City. That's a 50KW clear channel hair dryer. Those guys were using some tubes big enough to be landed aliens. Anyone here ever worked a site like that?