The "great" sound of reel to reel explained

I just wish A-gon had a "like button". Great thread people.

Ralph,
I think that you simplify the matter to suit your needs. Let's review:

Reel-to-Reel(tape playback), tubes and transformers (to a lesser extend) all create distortion in the form of phase shifts and alter the harmonic structure often to increase clarity and enhance low-level details as a psychoacoustic effect that is pleasing in an aural way to our brain.

Second, while professional and industrial line regulation and power conditioning devices do offer benefits, supported through data, they are also priced and marketed in a fashion where the claims can be supported; that is not the case for most of the high-end audio's products.

I do not want to lose sight of the main discussion topic here with a sideband discussion so I strongly encourage you to educate yourself with the following article:

Analogue Warmth The Sound Of Tubes, Tape & Transformers

After you read it, we can go on but I think that you'll get the point!

Colouration and distortion are spoken by some talking heads a as a bad thing. But hold on partner. When we listen to even a LIVE event even if the direct sounds are accurate based on the tuning of the instruments and the vocalist we get a preponderance of sound via multiple reflections and each reflection we pick up on is coloured by the surface texture and the shape of it as the reflection bounces to our ears. We live in a world of coloured sound be it live or recorded.

Recorded sound will reflect the design of the recording room or venue. The sound of our listening rooms will colour and distort the sound we hear. And yes the equipment we use from the playback of the source through to the speakers will all add subtle colourations and distortions.

This nonsense that we can engineer a colourless and accurate audio sound track should stop.

Heck, even our ears, the Pinna ??? Outer ear and canal will colour the sound for each of us.

In the end only when sound is gravely coloured, distorted or muted will we find it objectionable. Before that point is reached it is all subjective to our personal preferences.

Better analogue sources can make great sound be they vinyl or tape. Better digital sources can make great sound too. Poor sound is result of poor engineering of both the recording and the equipment made to replay it all.

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Great article Carlos.....thank you.
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Carlos269, upon reading this article I am struck by the simple fact that the guy who wrote it must have an atrocious monitor system! -and is either partially deaf (common with engineers in the studio) or simply has no idea which way is up. I too have run recording studios for the last 30 years and digital has to be one of the biggest single steps backwards to occur in that time.

Using 24-bit files (which we use as backups for our analog machines), **anyone** who hears the comparison between them always comments on how much better the analog machines sound. There is a greater sense of presence, greater sense of soundstage, improved tonality (I find that even with the 'treble' controls run all the way down, that digital often still sounds bright). Admittedly, the 88KHz scanning and higher has helped a lot since you get rid the brickwall filter, but they still, in a word, suck.

As far as conditioning goes, please re-read my comments- your comments sound like you did not read mine. For brevity I will restate one thing- most high end audio conditioners are terrible. But if you thus assume *all* are therefore bad you commit a logical fallacy called 'guilt by association'. see http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ for more info on logical fallacies.

As far as tubes go: if you build single-ended transistor circuits you will get terrible distortions, requiring a lot of feedback to (poorly) correct. So most transistor circuits these days are balanced, even if they only have single-ended inputs. With tubes you can not only build them single-ended, but you can run them zero feedback and they will still have acceptable distortion figures (if you are able to run them at a low enough level the distortion cannot be measured). The Ampex 351 is an example of such a beast. Its distortion is quite low until you are nearly saturating the tape, and there is less phase shift than you see in digital systems. As you record at lower levels (for example, hall ambiance) the distortion vanishes.

Compare that to digital: if you have 16 bits to express 0VU, you get only 8 to express -45 db (where the hall ambiance is). 8 bits sounds like a cheap phone message machine. Its not hifi. That is why digital lacks low level detail.

Now don't get me wrong- there are a lot of products out there that take advantage of tube distortions in order to create effects. Often they starve the tube; a circuit that should be running 200V on the plate of the tube is only getting 12Volts, things like that. Its a fact that tubes have pleasing distortions, and its something that everyone should pay attention to, because devices that have irritating distortions aren't going to help :) This is why I spoke of human perceptual rules earlier- our ears find these things pleasant or unpleasant for a reason!
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Al, the reason a power cord can have this effect is simple. If there is a 2 volt drop in a power cord, the filaments of the tubes will run cooler and the B+ will be reduced. Since this is a voltage, the result is we get less voltage output out of the amp. Less voltage=less power. Depending on the amp this can be pretty profound. and I have seen it with my own eyes. I do agree though that that does not justify a $2000 power cord, but it **does** justify one that has decent connectors and conductors that will not heat up at all. That has to cost something, probably not $2000 though. One thing about audio is that if there is a phenomena, there is also snake oil for it.