Posted by thetubeguy1954 [ 216.230.40.218 ] on December 10, 2004 at 09:22:58:
In Reply to: Re: Some reasons why SETs sound different posted by akhilesh on December 09, 2004 at 21:09:49:
akhilesh, thanks for welcoming me to the "table". I knew from your post that you both owned and enjoyed the sound of SET amps. As I said this is a tough topic to discuss, for a myriad of reasons. We do need to establish one thing however or else this discussion will have too many variables. What is going to be our definition of accuracy for this discussion?
My definition of accuracy is; An accurate replication of music is the one that SOUNDS the closest to the original acoustic event as interpreted by the human ear. I do not believe we can define accuracy as the one that MEASURES closer to a microphones interpretation of the original event. I noticed you completely ignored this area of my post. If a microphone hears or interpets a musical signal differently than the human ear does, and I believe that is the case for reasons stated in my previous post. How or why would we use the microphones interpretation as the standard of accuarcy? For example: Humans hear differently than dogs. Granted in this case it's in areas of frequencey and sensitivity, but ihey hear differently. Could we then use a humans hearing to accurately determine what a dog hears? No, we cannot! Neither do I believe can we use a microphone to accurately determine what a human hears, for the exact same reasons. The "hear" differently. If we are to continue this discussion you'll need to address this issue. But I will not continue this discussion after this if you do not address the issue or whether or not; a) Humans & Mics hear differently and b) Why you choose a Mics interpretation over a humans as your basis for defining accurate.
Now to address some of your points.
A)You stated "I LIKE how they (SET's) alter the signal. But that they alter the signal can be easily proved.
The question my friend is not whether an SET alters a signal or not. I will readly admit that an SET will alter the electronic signal it receives. But, what we really need to know is how close does the signal fed to an SET accurately represent what a human hears? It's my belief that in altering the signal, the SET's output is actually closer to what a human hears. Hence, the output sounds more realistic because it's a more accurate replication of what we hear at an unamplifed acoustic event.
B)I think most people would define it as the measurable faithful reporoduction of an input signal at hte output...but hey....who cares? It's all semantics.
I think ENGINEERS would define accurate as the measurable faithful reproduction of an input signal at the output. Music lovers "should" define accurate as an output that replicates the original acoustic event as faithfully as possible to the human ear.
C)Anything a tube amp can do in terms of amplifying a signal, an SS amp can do.
I don't doubt this at all. I remember when Bob Carver did that famous experiment. If I remember correctly he fed the output of his amp and the amp he wanted his amp to sound like, to a common location. He then kept making adjustments to his amp until he got a "null" as the reading at this common location (or something like this) and when he got a null reading the amps sounded the same! However, I do believe that Solid State designers won't make their amps sound like a SET's Why? Because they are glued to specifications as their guide instead of their ears. Why else doesn't Bob buy a $5K or $10K SET and make a $1000 solid state amp that sounds like it? Trust me I'd buy it in a New York minute! I'd save 1000's of dollars, not have to deal with the heat of 845 in Class A, not have to pay BIG BUX for good NOS tubes, the amp wouldn't weigh a ton, I could afford to Tri-amp etc. But if it should happen that someone out there does make a solid state amp sound like a good SET, he'll just charge you $5000 for a $500 amp because it sounds like an SET. So I don't have much faith in that group of engineers. But you're correct they could do it "IF" they wanted too.
D)The reason why such a thng is not done, in my opinion, is becuase most amps today are based on commercial chips, and no chip designer will design an amplifier that would conform to the specs of a tube...they'd be laughed out of the business.
I disagree with this statement 100%. Bob did it with components back in what the 70's or 80's? It's not because of the commercial chips being used. Again I say it's because they are glued specifications as their guide to being accurate, when they should just use their ears.
Again, this is a very tough discussion. Until we agree on how we define accurate we cannot agree on anything else in the discussion. It's catch 22 Thanks for your thought and input.
Tom Scata (thetubeguy1954)