Tubes Tubes why??

[Eric]

Grant:

See my article in IEEE SPECTRUM:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/select/0898/tube.html
It discusses the pros and cons of designing audio
equipment with tubes or transistors. Even has
distortion spectra for a triode, a pentode, and
various
transistors in simple circuits--demonstrates quite
effectively that the triode has both the lowest
distortion,
AND lower noise than the lowest-distortion
transistors.

And there are other things transistors do which
have to
be accounted for (and often aren't), like thermal
tailing
and voltage-varying capacitances. Tubes are free
of
these semiconductor problems. (They just have
different
problems.....but ones that don't severely
interfere with
audio amplification!)

--Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Richter <grichter at execpc.com>
To: Paul Maddox <Paul.Maddox at unilever.com>;
synthdiy <synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl>
Date: Monday, December 13, 1999 7:29 AM
Subject: Re: Tubes Tubes


>Would someone be kind enough to explain why tube
>circuitry is preferable for audio over solid
state?
>I realize this has probably been beat to death
>on ault.audio.hifi but is there a short
explanation?
>
>I mean if two different circuits which are linear
gain stages,
>both amplifying the same signal and one sounds
>different from the other, then one is non-linear,
>or they are both non-linear in different ways.
>It seems to me to be a case of the circuit
failing to follow
>the mathematical prediction of the circuit
action.
>Now this can be a good thing, but is what sense
is
>it failing? And which one fails in which way?
>
>At the time solid state was taking over for
tubes,
>the best explanation I heard, which only applied
to
>large power amps, was that during peak clipping,
>a tube amplifier would clip with a perfect square
>corner which produced only odd harmonic
distortion.
>A transistor amp would go into "soft clipping"
which was
>waveform rounding and mathematically produced
>inharmonic partials like a ring modulator.
>
>Is that true?
>
>Thanks for the background.
>
>
>----------
>> From: Paul Maddox <Paul.Maddox at unilever.com>
>> To: synthdiy <synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl>
>> Subject: Tubes Tubes
>> Date: Monday, December 13, 1999 2:17 AM
>>
>> All,
>>
>>   Found this, looked kinda like fun...
>>
>> http://www.clarkson.edu/~stokessd/dac.html
>>
>>   A DAC useing a tube...
>>
>>   Paul
>>
>>
**************************************************
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>> *   Modulus Synthesiser DIY page ;- *
>> * http://www.xavax.com/modulus *
>> *  Email ;- *
>> *   Paul.Maddox at unilever.com *
>>
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>