"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Michael McKelvy" wrote in message
nk.net
Is now a web magazine.

www.theaudiocritic.com

They have a great review of the Linkwitz Labs Orion speakers. Very
favorable and a steal for the money.

They are also giving away this article, which is a classic:

http://www.theaudiocritic.com/downloads/article_1.pdf

2. The Vacuum-Tube Lie
This lie is also, in a sense, about a peripheral
matter, since vacuum tubes are
hardly mainstream in the age of silicon.
It's an all-pervasive lie, however,
in the high-end audio market; just
count the tube-equipment ads as a percentage
of total ad pages in the typical
high-end magazine. Unbelievable! And
so is, of course, the claim that vacuum
tubes are inherently superior to transistors
in audio applications-don't
you believe it.

Tubes are great for high-powered
RF transmitters and microwave ovens
but not, at the turn of the century, for
amplifiers, preamps, or (good grief!)
digital components like CD and DVD
players.

What's wrong with tubes?
Nothing, really. There's nothing wrong
with gold teeth, either, even for upper
incisors (that Mideastern grin); it's just
that modern dentistry offers more attractive
options. Whatever vacuum
tubes can do in a piece of audio equipment,
solid-state devices can do better,
at lower cost, with greater reliability.

Even the world's best-designed tube
amplifier will have higher distortion
than an equally well-designed transistor
amplifier and will almost certainly need
more servicing (tube replacements,
rebiasing, etc.) during its lifetime. (Idiotic
designs such as 8-watt single-ended
triode amplifiers are of course exempt,
by default, from such comparisons since
they have no solid-state counterpart.)

As for the "tube sound," there are
two possibilities: (1) It's a figment of
the deluded audiophile's imagination,
or (2) it's a deliberate coloration introduced
by the manufacturer to appeal
to corrupted tastes, in which case a
solid-state design could easily mimic
the sound if the designer were perverse
enough to want it that way.


I can't wait for my next issue of Stereophile,
chock full of ads for SS amps claiming to sound like
tube amps, at a fraction of the cost!


Aczel is so flummoxed, he can't even tell
us which of the two alternatives (as to tube sound)
he presented is operative. It can't be both!/



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