SOLID STATE AND ZOMBIES

[mep]

I have come to the conclusion that music reproduced through solid state electronics has as much soul as a zombie brought back to life through voodoo.  I tried to like SS, really I did.  I was tired of the headaches associated with owning tube gear, and tube amps in particular. 

I used to own two Quicksilver MS-190s, but I couldn?t keep them running.  Mike Sanders designed the MS-190 around the ?real? Mullard EL-34, which the cognoscenti know is one tough tube.  And tough it had to be because Mike puts 425v on the screen grid which is the design maximum along with 53 ma of bias current and enough plate voltage to push the plate current to the hairy edge of 25 watts of plate dissipation which is also the design maximum.  The SED EL-34 could almost stand up to the abuse, but not for long periods of time.  And so I sold the MS-190s and bought and ARC VT-100 MKII.  The ARC is a good sounding amp but the mechanical/electrical design is fatally flawed for me because of the craziness involved with setting the bias with a full tube change.  There is something like 27 screws that hold on the top cover of the amp which have to be removed each time you test/reset the bias for the output tubes.  Change the input tubes, and now you have to warm the amp up for 30 minutes, and then remove all of the screws that hold on the left and right side covers AND the 27 screws that hold the top on.  Pure nonsense-but not as bad as the new TEAC tube amp I read a review about yesterday.  The TEAC uses two KT-88s per side for a whopping 45 watts per channel and costs $19K.  The owner of the amp must send the amp back to an authorized dealer any time the tubes are changed or you want to check your bias.  Any attempt by the owner to set the bias himself will void your 3 year warranty!  Another fatally flawed product but I digress. 

In an act of rebellion, I sold the ARC amp and went SS.  I bought a Pass Labs X250 with the gleeful thoughts of no more expensive tube replacements and no more biasing issues to be dealt with.  Just turn it on, let it warm up, and listen.  Kind of like the ?look ma, no hands? approach people took when they abandoned their vinyl for the freedom of perfect sound forever from their CDs.  I wanted to like SS, really I did.  I tried to tell myself it sounded great, and at times I almost believed it.  And then I would put on a familiar piece of music on my vinyl rig and something I knew was there in the recording was now missing.  And if I was to sum up what was missing, it was the flesh on the bones wasn?t all there.  Part of the tonal colors (harmonics) that make up the sound of each instrument was MIA.  Back to the paint-by-numbers analogy-too many numbers didn?t have paint on them.

In retrospect, I should have known better.  I used to keep a McIntosh 2105 around as a back-up amp so that when my tube amp was down, I could keep the system up and running until my tube amp was fixed.  Except I found myself not wanting to turn the system on when the Mc was in the system.  I finally came to the realization that a back up amp wasn?t much good if you were unwilling to listen to it so I sold it.  The Pass Labs amp has also been sold and it is on its way to its new owner and I hope he loves it.

Which leads me to my next point-can any SS gear actually reproduce all of the harmonics of instruments (that even cheap tube gear does this with ease)?  If the answer is yes, I want to know at what price point that starts as I didn?t hear it in a $6K SS amp.  If the answer is no (and I think it is), I don?t know how people that should know better can fool themselves when they listen to music that they are hearing everything that is really on the recordings unless they never listen to live music and have never heard tube gear in their system.

I understand from a cost/maintenance standpoint why people would choose SS over tubes.  I get that, really I do.  It is ironic though that we accept maintenance costs for our automobiles but many are unwilling to do the same for a stereo system that they may have invested far more money in than the car they are driving.  We all realize that we have to change the oil frequently, buy new tires periodically, keep the front end aligned, install new brake pads, change out the anti-freeze, and install new wiper blades, etc.  Owning SS gear is the equivalent of not owning a car and therefore shedding your maintenance duties and costs.  This is a noble goal if you can live without the benefits that come from ownership.  I decided I can?t live without the benefits of tube ownership.

I just purchased a Jadis Defy 7 from the original owner who thankfully took meticulous care of it.  It looked like it was brand new when I removed it from the box.  I just set it up yesterday so I can?t pretend to have the measure of the amp yet.  But, I can say that the flesh is back on the bones and there are no more zombies wandering around my listening room.  And now I have another 18 tubes to feed and care for?

[Tubes n tapes]

Great story Mark.
In my experience you have to do a really large investment to get SS gear that comes alive.  I've not heard any SS gear that is completely free from the typical SS coloration, eventhough in some (expensive) cases it is very tolerable.

I have done a lot of designing with tubes and solid state, and I have to say that only in the case of tubes have I been able to get to a point where the electronics are acoustically almost fully transparent. Therefore tubes still have my preference.

However the tube story is also far from clean. The very vast majority of tube gear out there adds significant coloration to the original recording. The difference with solid state is that we tend to like the tube coloration while the solid state coloration is normally perceived as annoying. That makes all that tube gear a lot more tolerable and pleasant, but not necessarily better. In practice more often than not the tube lover likes his colorations more than the reality of the recording. Unfortunately those pleasant colorations very often degrade the really well done recordings.

So in my opinion complete transparency should still be the ultimate goal and until now tubes can still get closer to that ideal than solid state can. It doesn't show very often in the audiophile world, though.

[ironbut]

Familiar story there Mark. I did my time with a Pass X350 too. And while it impressed the hell out of some of my pals (sometimes I think the look of the thing was enough for that) I found myself listening to my speaker rig less and less (my headphone rig has always been tube driven). I really enjoy my Conrad Johnson amp and I hope you like your Jadis.
 I still go out and listen to some of the ss amps from time to time just to see where they're at. I think the best that I've heard have been the big Edge signatures, and the Ayre Reference mono blocks. And while they do put a little more flesh on the bones at that price I could completely rebuild my speaker system to the SET rig I'm planning for one of these days. I'm interested in hearing the DarTZeel amps and preamps but perhaps MikeL can chime in here since I believe he has some.
I agree with Arian that tubes are a different coloration. And while my head says that ss is in many ways, more accurate to the graphs, my heart says that tubes do honor to the music and provide a more convincing recreation of the actual musical event.

[mep]

When people talk about liking distortion from tubes (and I am leaving out tube guitar amps which are designed to be driven into saturation and people who love single-ended tube amps which do add layers of second harmonic distortion), I am not sure what that really means.  What kind of distortion do push-pull tube amps add to the signal that is pleasant?  What I hear from solid state amps is an inability to recreate all of the information that is there.  Each note played on an instrument has a fundamental frequency and harmonics which make up the sound of that note on that particular instrument.  My contention is that solid state is incapable of capturing all of the harmonics associated with a given note played on a given instrument which is an error of omission and not commission.  And that is why they sound white, bright, and light compared to the real thing and tube amps because they are focused on the fundamental tone and miss capturing the harmonics.

 Because something measures ruler flat and has a wide bandwidth merely means it can recreate a pure sign wave swept across the band.  Music is not made up of pure sign waves.  I am not aware of any testing methodology that can measure the amount of music harmonics (as differentiated from pure sine wave harmonics) that are recreated by a given amplifier under test and measure that against the amount of actual music harmonics that were present at the input signal to the amplifier to see what was lost or what was added to the music signal.  I know it can easily be done with sine waves, but again, they aren?t music.  So maybe I am out in left field somewhere, but it is my contention that tube amps are more faithful to capturing all of the sound of a given instrument (and that includes voices) than SS amps and that ability is NOT distortion or a coloration.

[ceved]

I have found Spectral Audio components give a good accounting of themselves in the service of music.

[mikel]

i have been fighting this battle between naturalness and neutrality for awhile. i want it all.....the breath of life which seems to come from tubes and avoiding coloration that tubes seem to bring. i want to hear music and not a signature of the circut. i know many here require a golden hue before they can listen....for me that is not much better than sterile solid state. easier to listen to perhaps but distracting from the music none-the-less. and lacking the control and definition at frequency extremes.

9 years ago when i was jumping from Wilson-Levinson into a 'less-hifi' sound, i discovered OTL tube amplifiers and passive preamps.....along with a speaker with a first-order crossover. Tenor-Placette-Kharma seemed to light my fire. simple circuts, passive attenuation, and simple crossover brought me much closer to musical truth. i had that breath of life and immediacy which served the music well.

later i moved and built a much larger listening room which inevitably led to looking for a more dynamically capable speaker. i was also exposed to the darTZeel brand of amps and then preamps. darTZeel is a solid state Swiss product which is amazingly simple in it's circutry and in my opinion actually attains this combination of the 'breath of life' of tubes in a solid state product, with a vanishingly low noise floor, and that excellent definition in the frequency extremes and wonderful microdynamics. the dart has a very sweet extended high frequency....with absolutely no coldness, harshness or edge. really.....the sound of music without the sound of a circut.

if you want an idea of the design philosphy of this 'best of tubes and solid state amp' or just want to be entertained; you can read about the ideas of Herve Delatraz, the maker of darTZeel at this link;

http://www.dartzeel.com/PDF_Files/AudioManuEN.pdf

note; this link is to a PDF of a manual for an amplifier. but what it really is is about the design philosophy of the product. so don't give up until you read a little bit of it.

[Tubes n tapes]

Coloration comes in many shapes and forms. Harmonic distorsion is only one of them which by itself is quite easy to remedy. The most important audible coloration that does not show up as measurable harmonic distortion is caused by the fact that many parameters of components change as a result of the actual signal going through it, especially when it is a very complex signal like music. This happens a little in passive components and a lot in active components.  Transformers and inductors are the worst passive components in that area but all active components exhibit that problem to an even greater extend.

The parameters affected in tubes and transistors are similar in several areas, but they differ in others. Especially the number of parameters that show a modulation effect in transistors is much higher which makes it much more difficult to deal with. Tubes have a stronger tendency to modulate their own working set points. This is audibly perceived as a warmth in the sound. Transistors do the same, albeit in a lesser degree, but the transistor circuits that are used nowadays take a lot of that effect out.

The single ended triode circuit makes 'optimum use' of these modulation effects both in the tubes and the transformer which is for a significant part the reason why they sound so warm and natural, even if the distorsion is low. In fact if you use the same single ended transformer coupled circuit design with a transistor a similar warmth and naturalness appears but also a significant amount of solid state coloration due to the other parameters that are modulated by the signal.

A push pull design takes out even harmonic distorsion and also some of these parameter modulation effects, but by far not all of it.

So the bottom line is we like our tube colorations large or small but we hate SS colorations even if they are real small. As for tubes conserving information that gets lost with SS, I haven't been able to systematically detect that in any way. SS tarnishing some of your low level information where tubes do not, certainly.

But when you compare a very well designed tube system with a very well designed SS system, the differences get pretty small and what remains is the recording and the music. (But if push comes to shove I would still go for tubes......n tapes)

[ceved]

The beloved shoot out takes on many forms and seems to have as many lives as Count Yorga vampire.

If any of these shoot out threads actually accomplished anything other than give each of us the opportunity to convince other people that we were correct I could muster more enthusiasm for them.
Perhaps the Forum police could create a "Shoot Out' thread so that those of us who would rather avoid such musings would be able to so more efficiently.

Then again perhaps a Forum thread entitled Drivel should be created so that other forum members could avoid my posts which would be required to appear exclusively in that location.

[Ben]

I guess 'Night of the living dead' is a SS movie then.  Now what are some
good 'valve' movies to watch. :)  I suspect the problem with SS is that the active
devices are designed for power out, rather than good amplication. Some people
figure the best tube is the 45 that was designed in 1945... oops 1929. All I know
is music has been going downhill since Pentodes and quad LP's came out. Right
now I a trying to put together a 6a5 PP Amp and finding the right caps is a pain.
I would like to stick what could have been out at the time, and later build a second
version with modern 'audio' quality parts ... some day to compare the two.
 

[ironbut]

Killer idea Ben. I have an old Ampex F44 that is an all tube reel to reel.  The frequency rolls off gently on both ends and its clunky and noisy. But, I really love that thing. Back when the TP was still a twinkle in someones eye (hey when you were a kid, did you ever wonder what the hell that meant?) I upgraded some of the caps and replaced a few other odds and ends.
 Fast forward a couple of years,.. I got the Technics and the Repro amp and hadn't thought about that old Ampex I have in the garage. I got to talking about old oil caps and such with somebody and I thought, " Hey, that's what I should do with my old F44. I should just put in all vintage caps and really make it into a super euphonic machine." A few days latter I remembered that that's what it was before I loaded it up with Auricaps and fancy connectors. Unfortunately the garbage man had dragged those parts away a couple of years earlier and now, I never throw old parts away (unless they're leaking all over the place).

[Ben]

Perhaps the better thing to do is look at why you have the frequency
cut offs you do, in you schematic, and fix values if need be. If you don't buy
'audio' parts resistors and caps are cheap compared to when it came out.
Still it may be time to have another look at it, and just see what is does
with a alignment tape.

[ironbut]

It's the heads. They start rolling off at 15k and are lucky to make it much below 40 hz. Those are the stock spec's. Still pretty nice though.

[mep]

Charles-I never intended for this thread to be about a "shoot out."  Rather, it was about one man's obervations gleened during a time of trying to convert to SS.  I have no interest in a SS vs. tube shoot out.  For me, that war is over and I don't need anyone to tell me who won.

And still, I would like to hear a Spectral system as they intend it to be heard with all MIT cables and I would love to hear MikeL's system with the darTZeel electronics.

[docb]

I got bad news for you bro. Those heads start rolling off at more like 12K. But those old Fine Lines are still cool. The repro circuit is not that far off from the one in the 350.

[ironbut]

Yeah, I knew it was something like that. More of a guess'itmate on my part. It's kinda amazing how good it can sound without the benefit of a wider bandwidth. I thought about trying to patch in my Technics into the repro amp just for fun but never did.