[Arny Krueger]

"Bill Noble" wrote in message

"Dick Pierce" wrote in message
...
Bill Noble wrote:
but that doesn't make tubes obsolete - for those who
like the sound, they are the only way we know of at
this time to make it.

If by "we", you mean the high-end audio industry, you're
probably right. But that's because so much of what
passes for technical "knowledge" in the high-end
industry is woefully behind the
or just plain wrong. One can't engage in a rational
discussion or debate with many of the high-end
luminaries simply because
of their appalling, entrenched technical ignorance. What
passes for real "state-of-the-art" knowledge is woefully
behind the times, one example being the concept of
jitter in data streams: the high-end business discovered
it DECADES after it was a
known and solved phenomenon elsewhere. And in the
meantime,
your treasured Mark Levinson produced a DAC that was so
badly designed from a view point of mixed signal and
clock recovery that, had that engineer worked in a real
company, he'd find himself in the unemployment queue
faster than he could think about it.

And, again, we can thank the high-end press for
encouraging these idiots.

I can see that this not a technical discussion, but an
emotional argument based on deeply held personal beliefs

Actually, its pretty easy to figure out whether the ML DAC is deeply flawed
or not.

Problems with mixed signal design and clock recovery show up on the test
bench pretty quickly.

- you claim, by implication, that I cannot hear a
consistent difference between tube and transistor amps,

This is in accordance with actual double blind amplifier tests done under
level-matched conditions.

It is possible with some nontrivial expense and inconvenience to build tubed
power amps that are low enough in coloration and distortion to pass
comparison with either a straight wire or a good cheap (or expensive) SS
power amp. I've heard it done.

and you choose to cast aspersions at a piece of equipment
none of us were talking about (by the way, I have a ML
DAC and find it vastly superior in sound quality to
anything else I tested).

Please share the unbiased nature of those tests.

I find that discussions
involving "idiots", "real company" and "treasured" in the
same thread are not intended to enlighten, only to anger.

It is not unusual for people who have devoted their lives to developing true
quality equipment that is as uncolored and undistorted as possible to become
emotional when people literally throw equipment together and trade on hype
and name-dropping to sell their low-performance gear for inflated prices to
a market that is willfully kept as ignorant as possible.

I have stated my position, I am not going to engage in a
debate based on rumor and innuendo.

Then you might offer your ML DAC up for some unbiased testing, and we will
get to the bottom of this controversy.