I don't really think it was that early, if you are talking about serious amps. I got my first transistor amp, a Heathkit, in Nov. 1963. I think tubes were still the rule in 1965, I was using SS but most of my friends still had tubes. The demise of tubes was signaled when I looked in the window of a high end store in Chicago and saw 8b's being closed out at $149. Almost bought one but I switched early and have never wanted to go back.
What year did tube lose to SS
There was a major paradigm shift when CD became the media of choice I think it happened in 1982. All of sudden I went to the recprd stores and found CDs instead.
Similarly although I was too young to remember first hand, there had to be a year that saw the golden era of HI FI all tubed mostly stereo gave way to Transistor or Solid State. Please take a guess. I have no statistic but I think it was 1964. Was that The year when more SS amps were produced than tubed amps?
Similarly although I was too young to remember first hand, there had to be a year that saw the golden era of HI FI all tubed mostly stereo gave way to Transistor or Solid State. Please take a guess. I have no statistic but I think it was 1964. Was that The year when more SS amps were produced than tubed amps?
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Yes, it was probably somewhere in the 1965 to 1970 time-frame, hastened by the commercial success of a lot of poor sounding made-in-Japan solid state gear, which the leading American manufacturers from the golden era of tube hifi were not successful competing against. Among the leading American manufacturers of tube equipment during the "golden age," based on a quick Google search, Avery Fisher sold his company in 1969; H. H. Scott in 1973, after producing (or at least selling) solid state gear for several years, without much success; Saul Marantz in 1964 (hastened by financial problems, apparently caused largely by the development and production costs of the legendary 10B tuner). McIntosh exists to this day, of course, pretty much in its original incarnation (although now under foreign ownership). Among their earliest solid state products, I believe, were the MC50 power amp introduced in 1969, and the C24 preamp introduced in 1964. A separate but related question is when did solid state gear began to be competitive in sonic terms, by audiophile standards. Other readers of this thread may be interested in the following thread from a few months ago, to which you made some good contributions: http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?htech&1236884200 Regards, -- Al |
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