tubes and analog

I am plenty calm Raul, despite your attempts otherwise. And FWIW, my statements are plenty 'fair'... (whatever *that* means :)

I have yet to see any of the solid state that you refer to, having been doing CES and the like since 1989 I've been exposed to a lot of it, and a lot of it has been quite expensive. I also do not have to rely on opinion.

Many transistor units have higher distortion at lower output levels where low level detail exists. Tubes OTOH make vanishingly low distortion at lower levels- so low level detail is not obscured by distortion. This is so easy to demonstrate at almost any cost level that your statement would seem to strain credulity.

I have owned literally hundreds of tubes and solidstate amps and preamps (and phonostages) over the years, everything from MFA Lumi C/MC Reference, Lamm L1/L2, Airtight ATE-2/ATM-2, Counterpoint SA4/SA9/SA11, Atma-Sphere M60s, Futterman OTL3/H3A, Vendetta SCP-2B, JRDG Cadence/Coherence II, Threshold SA1/SA4e, Spectral DMC-20 NKII, Levinson ML-2/6B/7A/N0.26s/25s/20.6/380S, Marantz 2/5/7C/8B, etc, and currently have 5 turtables (EMT 930ST, Garrard 301 w/EMT 997 and SME3012R, Thorens TD124 II with Ortofon RMG212, Linn LP12 Valhalla w/ Naim Aro, and Win SDC-1) hooked up to various tube and solidstage equipments and I have owned many other turntables in the past.

I believe I am qualified to speak my opinion based on my experience, so please don't tell me I have not heard a properly set up system with the state-of-the-art analog and tube electronics.

While I prefer tube over solidstate and agree with your opinion that tube gears sound smoother than SS in general, I don't think tubes inherently retrieve more details than transistors. It all depends on the design and how competent a designer is.

You obviously have a vested interest in tubes, being a manufacturer of OTL amps and preamps (I like/admire your design a lot), and I can certainly appreciate your enthusiasm and strong belief in the superiority of tube over transistor, but stating your opnion as if it is the only truth does not earn my respect (not that you need it!).

I have heard many lousy sounding/unreliable tube equipments and the same can be said of the SS gears too. I have also heard and owned some very nice sounding tube gears and the same can be said of the SS gears.

Kind of off topic but....one other "problem" with my analog rig is that recordings either sound stunning or not so good. where my Digital all sounds "great". Is this again a problem with my cart and phono pre.

Dear Atmasphere: I apologize for my earlier comment which an American friend explained to me was worded incorrectly. When I said, “I know very well your units but I would not exhibit any of your products”
what I really meant was that I know your units very well, and are not mentioning them (or any other products) as an example to debate. My view is that we can’t generalize that ALL tubes or ALL ss sound a certain way, and that the individual design of the component makes all the differences.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

The big advantage tubes have over solid state is that they are *far* more linear. Their gain characteristic is many times better than a transistor or integrated circuit. They also overload in a much more sonically benign fashion, tending towards compression rather than clipping.

Most solid state amplification employs feedback (and lots of it) to cure the nonlinear gain ills. The closest you can get to a tube is by using JFETs open loop. They're pretty good, but still not in the same league as tubes.

On the other hand, most tube circuits require coupling caps. There is, as several of you have pointed out, no perfect design, and they all exhibit artful compromise.

But as Atmasphere points out, the micro details and very small signal information is better recovered via tubes. This is not just opinion, but a technical limitation of topology. The exception would be an open-loop class A gain stage using a reasonably linear active device such as a JFET.

jh