[Eeyore]

Arny Krueger wrote:

"Bret Ludwig" wrote in message

One is that the most necessary place for tubes is at the
mechanical/electrical interface

This is utter drivel !

Semiconductor amplifers are vastly better at driver louspeaker loads ( not least
because they eliminate the utterly compomised use of an output transformer ) and
for ultra-low noise inputs, once again semiconductors are miles ahead !


How wrong can one get? In Y2K tubes have only one technically-justified
role, and that is as a generator of EFX in production and musical instrument
applications.

Which is not to deny their usefulness there of course ( for intentionally adding
'artistic colouration' ) , but at least in that application you can choose the
amount of 'tube sound' you want in the final product.


and for the best pursuit
of that view, read the seminal and undefeated JAES paper,
Tubes or Transistors-Is There A Difference? by Russell O.
Hamm. It's readily avalable.

Hamm's paper is also readily debunkable. How this POS ever made the pages of
the JAES is one of those mysteries that has never been revealed to me. It
was a highly-biased, out-of-date work on the day it was submitted to the AES
review board, and it only gets worse with time.

It begs belief how it got through. I guess someone fancied being controversial
and it hangs like a dark cloud over us to this day. It's riddled with total and
complete untruths. Not to mention it's no example of modern semiconductor design
practice.

Graham