300b lovers

Ralph,

Your comments on this this thread, as on any thread, are extremely informative.   I have not had the pleasure of hearing your new affordably-priced Class D monos and maybe they will be playing at the Seattle show later this month so I could hear them then.  

You have had a career as a designer and builder of tube gear.  You now are selling a Class D amp with the new GaN technology.  Don and Lynn of course are solidly tube amplification adherents, make no mistake about that, but you seem to be straddling the line between an affinity for tube gear as well as Class D amplification. 

Are you at the point where you feel your Class D amps are equivalent to your best tube amps?  I have long anticipated that the day will come where the march of technology might render tube gear obsolete, but in the main at the moment, my experience with Class D amplification is somewhat akin to the unwarranted adoption in the 60s of lousy sounding solid state gear (everybody made a variant of it) over tube gear that took a very long time for the industry to recover from.  Tube gear, like vinyl sales, are better than they have been for a long time, but I remain dubious that Class D amps yield the same sonic goodness after extended listen sessions, than the better/best  tube amplifiers.  But then I have not heard your new Class D monos. Comments?

Lynn…. I really appreciate two comments… illusion generator… and the layman disadvantage of not hearing individual part changes…. both of which help explain why many of us go through a bunch of gear trying over and over to improve the illusion. 

Are you at the point where you feel your Class D amps are equivalent to your best tube amps?

@whitestix Yes.  After extended listen sessions as you put it I don't find that our tube amps bring anything to the party that the class D doesn't. I really doubt that we're the only ones that can do this so this has led me to thinking that tube power amps are on borrowed time at this point- that is if sound quality is the only arbiter. People do like the glow of tubes- so do I. But I've found also that I don't miss them in the slightest, despite liking tubes so much as to make a business of them.

There’s nothing quite like twiddling with a speaker crossover or the critical components on an amplifier. That brings the guesswork to an end. You know what increasing the slew rate of an amplifier sounds like ... it’s a pretty distinctive sound, actually. Likewise, if the tweeter crossover is screwed up, you hear tweeter distortion ... lots of it.

Which makes show-going by and large an unpleasant experience (although I love to meet people). I walk by a room, without going in, and I hear problems. Big ones. Multiple problems. And yes, I know how to fix them. But I’m not going to do it for free, and besides, most exhibitors really don’t want to hear unsolicited advice from a notorious busybody like me. So I just keep on walking. There might be one, two, or three rooms where the equipment is working OK, and I’ll spend most of the show there.

This might sound cynical, but seriously, I’ve been designing speakers since 1975. I can’t stand speakers with wonky response, multiple resonances, or gross distortion. And that’s most of the famous-name speakers, so they’re out. And they certainly don’t want to hear my wisecracks at first hand.

I got into tube-amp design around the early Nineties, and joining the staff at Vacuum Tube Valley was a fabulous learning experience, especially from Charlie Kittleson, a great guitar player, and John Atwood, an engineer’s engineer, having worked at Intel, Tandem Computing, and Apple. Sadly, Charlie passed on around 2000, but I’m still good friends with John Atwood. We’re both big fans of the history of technology, and can talks for hours on end about AC distribution systems in Japan and the arcana of NTSC, SECAM, and PAL color television. His current project is restoring a TeleType machine ... because why not? He’s also a ham radio enthusiast who builds vacuum tube rigs from scratch.

At any rate, those of us who do this for a living (although I am technically retired) can spot design errors pretty much immediately. My background is speakers and electronics, which also means I cannot ethically review anything, because all I would do is criticize, which isn’t fair to the manufacturer. Besides, the various designers all disagree with each other ... my designs are completely different from Atma-Sphere, or Audio Research, or Krell, etc. etc. We are all very opinionated.

Lynn,

My local tube tech was good friends with Charlie who lived near Sacramento and he had immense respect for him.  He published a magazine which I am sure you aware of, 100% tube centric.  I never met him but he was a legend in this neck of the woods for his tube knowledge. 

Ralph, it seems curious to me that knowledgable audiophiles would rely on anything but sound to be the arbiter of their purchase decisions.  Tube gear is a hassle and costly, but to my ears, it is the price to pay for such magnificent sound. I think buyers buy tube gear because it sounds better, pure and simple.