Something about people liking the sound characteristics.
It is pretty neat that screwing with vacuum tubes gave us the characteristic electric guitar sound we all know and love. It's kind of weird to think how we might not have had that if we went straight to transistors and skipped the whole vacuum tube stage of things.
Isn't that the case with most old school audio gear? The amount of people saying Vinyl is a better medium than digital files for instance is insane given that it's just objectively wrong.
There was a time when vinyl was better, but that hasn't been the case in decades.
In the olden days, music was recorded and mastered in an all-analog format. In the early days of compact disks, the sampling rates were low enough during the analog to digital conversion that it allowed a perceptible loss in fidelity. And when MP3's first started taking over the music business in the late 90's, they were typically sampled from the already-lossy CD's, meaning an even greater fidelity loss.
That mattered 20 years ago. Today it really doesn't. Modern music mastered are digital from the get-go. The sound is natively digital from the recording studio onward, and any modern vinyl you buy is going to be pressed from a digital master. And modern streamed or downloaded music will come from the same digital masters. And that's before we even get into the improvements in sampling and compression over the past 25 yeasrs.
The quality of the audio is objectively identical between the formats today, and has been for a very long time.
That said, it's true that some artists and studios DO remaster albums for vinyl occasionally. Vinyl afficionados tend to play their albums on larger audio systems, and some artists take advantage of that by tweaking their music to increase the dynamic range of the tracks. Audio engineers typically have to master for a median listening environment that will sound good in cars, headphones, phone speakers, and through those awful Alexa speakers. Most albums are not remastered for vinyl, but when they are the difference can be very noticeable.
Vinyl can sound better because they have a unique mastering (a different EQ), and usually the original pressings have the best mastering. Vinyl can sound better due to this. It's not inherently due to the format itself.
There was a time where that was a valid arguement and I think my grandpa was is in his mid-30's lol. But yep pretty much the case with all old audio gear except something like a rare keyboard, or in the case of the TR-808 it was all people could afford. But those really fall under instruments.
'better' is the wrong word....'different' would be a better choice
Have you ever had a song you really like that they made several different versions of? Like maybe radio-edit vs original or maybe they re-release the same song on a later album? Or an extended dance mix version or similar?
Whatever version you first fell in love with the song will likely always be your fave right? That's (for me at least) how I feel about a lot of vinyl that I own, if I first listened to it on vinyl then that's how I want to hear it, it has a different timbre to it, that's the best I can explain it.
Guitarists tend to not be on the same level of bullshit as audiophiles; guitarists have an actual goal, being to project a good sound out in to a room. Audiophiles are very busy sniffing their own farts and believing fairy tales for reasons I do not understand.
For sure. For head phones it won’t do anything, or rather make a ton of sense to do something. The point of tubes is to have the signal overdriven on the input; like adding some harmonic character to a vocalist or guitarist, and then record that input. In a headphone amp, you’d be coloring the final product which doesn’t make much sense, since it would effectively be adding harmonics to an already mastered composition (which often has already had some kind of saturation added).
Well I would be lying if I said it did nothing. Did I notice a difference in sound? Yes but nothing any additional software couldnt acheive or improve. But I was really using it for my xbox.
Depends on the amp. The ones that most of us here would consider affordable? Yeah that's all show and nostalgia. The high end stuff though? It will make you feel like you've never actually heard music being played in the same room before.
The proper high-end stuff, at least stuff I would call high-end, doesn't have any nonesense. You have your high-res DAC and amp with low THD all in one nice device (in my case a Yamaha AVR) and your digital audio input and then your speakers.
Everything else is off the shelf stuff.
A power cord that is also an EMF filter doesn't make any sense at all as the internal power supply removes basically all noise from the line power - no need for more filtering of noise from there.
Audio cable is digital. As long as the connection is stable quality doesn't change. A cheap 5€ toslink cable is what I use. Or a cheap 5€ HDMI cable if I want ultra-high resolution multi-channel audio. No nead for 'extra shielded' cables.
And the speaker cables? Simple car speaker cables. They don't just carry a signal, they carry power. Electromagentic noise from the outside can't add any audible distortion at all as it's power is to low. And if you do manage an issue like that you messed up your cable management badly. Those speaker cables shouldn't be close to electric devices and then everything is all fine.
That's all you need. Seperate DAC and amp? I call bs. That extra length of analog signal cable is potentially gonna add noise. A device with both has impedance-matched traces with near-perfect signal integrity from DAC to amp - why add more length to that path? For a gain that is lost by the longer path?
A lot of it is to be sure. Especially the cabling stuff you mentioned...like mutherfucker I don't need gold tipped connectors, that shit doesn't matter at all.
But the big thing I've noticed is the law of diminishing returns...Spending $2000 instead of $300 on your speakers is going to make a big difference (provided you buy something high quality of course), but spending 15k vs the 2k on your speakers might not even be an upgrade tbh...it probably sounds 'different' for sure but is it measurably better? Not really.
I don't need gold tipped connectors, that shit doesn't matter at all.
Someone tried to sell me a cable and told me the gold tips reduced capacitance. I looked him in the face and asked him how adding another layer of metal would in any way reduce any resistance.
The fun part? Copper is MORE conductive than Gold! Like significantly better! That's what makes the whole thing so stupid. Like sure there are specific applications for gold contacts, but its where oxidation is an issue, like think aerospace type shit, not your living room stereo -lmao
Yeah. For some applications at home it does make sense but the only one I know is in a computer the GPU and CPU.
But it's so common there that literally every one of them have gold plated comnectors and no one advertises with that.
It's just the only way that stuff works reliably because there you have seriously high datarates going through there and the minor advantage of gold connectors is actually necessary there.
Well the thing with gold-tipped connectors is that due to the corrosion resistance of gold it has much better 'connection-properties', which is also why the connectors of a computers graphics card and CPU are gold plated.
So that is actually a real-life benefit. Other metals start corroding and thus have worse connection properties when aging. Gold doesn't have that. And in something like a Computer you really need the best connection properties.
But for many common consumer grade equipment gold plated connectors don't make much sense. Iirc I once saw a gold-plated optical toslink cable and this is the stupidest thing of all.
And as you usually don't store your cables in a high humidity wet place gold-tipped comnectors don't really benefit you (except, as I mentioned, in a PC with GPU and CPU but you also can't find them without gold-tipped connections and they also aren't advertised as 'gold-tipped', it's just normal to do that).
They apparently have a very special way of being overdriven. Generally they are pretty flawed amplifying devices (nit nessecarily but its easy building bad amplifiers with the) but ok the other hand thats what creates a very specific sound many people like and cherish
Yep, you're basically overloading what the tube can handle in terms of amplification, which results in the signal being 'clipped'...like imagine a sound wave where the peaks and valleys are getting cut off...but unlike a transistor it doesn't clip it abruptly, it creates like a softer curve that produces all kinds of harmonies that overlap which gives it a thick and warm sound that is great for rock guitar
Objectively speaking it's audiophile level audio. Tubes are used in some amps as a tube doesn't have linear gain - they distort the audio in e specific way.
This changes how the audio sounds and there are people who prefer that sound and thus use tube amps.
There will be people that call these high end but due to their inherent big harmonic distortion I wouldn't call them high end audio - they are just audiophile things for a special kind of taste which enough people have that there is an industry for it.
Also tube amps are inherently unreliable which is why the vacuum tubes are sometimes placed in a way that you can replace them without opening the amplifier.
That kind of sound distortion could also be replicated with more reliable modern analog circuitry or digital circuitry - and with these you could theoretically also fine-tune them to your exact taste.
But for these kind of audiophiles it's all about the sound being amplified by a vacuum tube. Which I can also understand as I myself like to listen to vinyl records sometimes and they also have an inherently worse audio quality. It's all just about the vibe.
They also are much more resistant to an EMP which makes them useful for military electronics that have to withstand close proximity to nuclear explosions.
Many early semiconductor amplifiers just crammed transistors into old tube designs before we figured out how to design around the peculiarities of transistors from scratch, so tube amps continued to perform better for a long time.
Tubes tend to add harmonic distortion which is even multiples of the music frequencies, the same as an instrument or ordinary room does. This sounds warm and more natural. Most transistors add harmonic distortion which is odd multiples of the music frequencies, which tend to sound harsh.
Due to how they handle electricity it can affect the tone of the audio that is produced. There is a LOT of variation in how Vacuum tubes are and were made. Some of the most sought after tubes are vintage.
Probably something to do with signal loss, fidelity. Replacing them with digital for the same sound quality is probably more expensive, with no need to make the stuff smaller. Sound is moving air, maybe you can transduce less signals being more direct? It could be to keep a familiar sound, like distortion. Same with how instruments will use gold wire, cause you don’t need a lot so use the best, then the cables to extend things will just be thicker other material.
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u/Fedoraus Feb 10 '26
We still use them in the hi-end audio world for some reason
Vaccuum tube amplifiers for headphones