[Arny Krueger]

"Eeyore"
wrote
in message
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 !

Agreed. One major contribution of SS technology has been the vast reduction
in the use of transformers.

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.

Agreed.

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highly-biased, out-of-date work on the day it was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 hear that there were some political issues within the AES at the time.

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.

Hamm cooked the books when he chose his examples of SS design to compare to
tubes.