I’ve never done direct comparisons between tubed & solid state headphone amps but have many times over 40+ years w/ speakers albeit it never involved the recent super high solid state amps of $30 K + or so. We all know the negative aspects of tubed amps which are enough to turn off many folks ( heat, tube replacement costs, potential lack of full frequency extension at both ends in lesser designs etc.). The full bodied, rich, 3 dimensional sound w/ air & space around every instrument or singer in a good recording is very challenging for most solid state amps to achieve & im not sure if those qualities would be as apparent using headphones.
Is tube sound vs solid state easier to distinguish using headphones?
Well designed tube amplifiers and solid state amplifiers in general sound remarkably similar with a wide range of music. The slight holographic and imaging properties that tubes can allegedly portray over certain solid state designs is what brings people to the “tube sound” camp. My question for the audiophiles here is whether it’s even detectable in most speaker setups or does a high quality pair of headphones showcase the tube sound qualities more accurately due to their near-field nature?
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@jonwolfpell Agreed - and the wonderful spatial qualities of a great 2ch system are definitely not there in even the very best headphone setups. Back on the topic of acoustics - because the end product of "what we hear and enjoy" goes through so much processing and interpretation in our brains, I think it’s possible there are significant personal differences in "how much" someone hears the room versus the primary sound source, proportionally. |
This is called psychoacoustics... We can even adress some psychoacoustics factors in a room in a way or in another... I did it... These psychoacoustics factors matter as much if not more than any dac or amplifier or speakers design... For example: All stereo systems are plagued by crosstalk effect... An upgrade of a piece of gear will not correct that... Most people had no idea of the acoustic information losses in all stereo system anyway... The different way any piece of gear process the acoustic information matter less than crosstalk effects most of the times if the gear pieces are minimally relatively good to begin with because the crosstalk information loss is huge... The only exception to this will be comparing the information loss from a bad low cost system compared with one good high end one in the same living room ...
This make no sense to me because the source is not a turntable or a digital files, these are mere processing tools, it is the recording acoustics information content resulting from choices of the engineer using his mics craftmanship to record in a specific room; my systems/room must translate this for my ears and give me back this "source" of acoustic timbre, spatial information in an immersive faithfull way. Second i dont hear my room , i hear because my room is acoustically optimized, i hear the acoustic information of the original recording... For example i hear the Organ recorded in a church as if i was in the church not in my room..i dont hear my speakers as if the sound was coming from them at all, they disapear completely and the same must be true for headphones,but it is very rare for headophone to be the case... Perhaps the RAAL will do it better though compared to my Akg K340 modified as they did it already in a realistic acceptable speaker like way...No other headphones i used do it at all ...
You speak as if the gear pieces choices were the main factor. Marketing want to convince us that it is such. It is false even if for sure all pieces of gear are different and their synergy matter... But gear choices is the starting point of audiophiles, as it was for me; but in truth the room and all acoustics factors (ears-head measures included ) is the beginning and the end and what really matter the most...
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Gear choices are important because we begin by buying some... They are less important once they are done wisely because the real work begin after ... What matter after a synergetical system is bought ,AT ANY PRICE, is the way we mechanically, electrically and acoustically embed it in these three workings dimensions... Acoustics here is one but the more important one... Most speakers are more revealing of all acoustics factors at play than most headphones yes.But i must correct you, It is not true in all cases, and it is not true for my AKG K340 and probably not for the RAAL if we trust the owner above... i apologize for my insistence though ...because you are really a kind person ...My deepest respect...
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