"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Robert Morein" wrote in message
"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
om...
Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I
think could benefit from it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...t=0&ti d=137&
mode=thread&cid=6791612
A buddy of mine has some good tube stuff, and some good vinyl to go
along with it.
While I personally know maybe 80-100 serious audiophiles, I know none with
a
100% tube-vinyl system in operation. Indeed, I personally have as much if
not more tube-vinyl equipment in operation as any of them. With all that
is
written about tubes and vinyl, I wonder who is it that actually has all
this
stuff?
I listen to it, but never with envy.
Agreed. Vinyl is noisy and can be very ugly-sounding. The best tubed
equipment is sonically indistinguishable from SS.
I have never heard any which was sonically indistinguishable from the best
solid state.
They are always loose on the bottom, and the high distortion above 10 kHz is
readily detectable.
To me, good solid state and good CDs are better.
CDs versus vinyl is no contest - digital wins. Tubes is IME like SS with
more hassle.
The frontiers of high quality audio relate to personal audio and mobile
audio, which is practically speaking digital and solid state to its core.
This tubes and vinyl stuff is strictly a boomer thing, and boomers are
quickly approaching the age where their interest in audio falls off
because
their ears no longer work so well.
Commercially, that is true.
But the absolute frontier of quality is in extremely low distortion,
massively constructed solid state amplifiers for home use, some of which
have innovative construction, or extreme attention to detail -- such as:
active constant current sources where others would use a resistor and a
voltage drop
heavily shielded chassis
distributed capacitance
regulated power supplies
and
low hysteresis drivers, with composite diaphrams vetted by laser inferometry
and
upsampling DACs, which allow construction of low pass filters with less
phase shift