Re: Cowboys herding cats

"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
Karl Johanson <karljohanson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
However, I did recently pull two pieces of electronics out of a
closet and give them to someone who refurbished them. But they
weren't servers, they were stereo amplifiers. Vacuum-tube stereo
amplifiers, which I had no use for, but which this person, far
younger than me, considers valuable due to beliefs about tubes that
I consider mere superstition.

They think tubes produce "rounder" or "richer" sound?

Yes. Warm life-affirming sound the way God and Lee De Forest
intended, not the vile mockery that comes from cold soulless
transistors.

From the article: http://www.ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html

"Vinyl records and vacuum tube equipment are very popular with devoted
audiophiles who believe these old school technologies more faithfully
reproduce subtle nuance. There's no question that LPs and tubes sound
different from CDs and solid state gear. But are they better? Not in any way
you could possibly measure. Common to both is much higher distortion; LPs in
particular have more inherent noise and a poorer high frequency response,
especially when playing the inner grooves. I'm convinced that some people
prefer tubes and vinyl because the subtle distortion they add sounds
pleasing to them. Adding small amounts of distortion can make a recording
sound more cohesive, for lack of a better word. Recording engineers
sometimes add distortion intentionally to imitate the sound of tubes and
analog tape, and I've done this myself. Simply copying a song to a cassette
tape and back adds a slight thickening that can be pleasing if the
instrumentation is sparse. But clearly this is an effect, not higher
fidelity."

I suggested building a CD player that used nothing but vacuum tubes.
Better yet, an MP3 player.

If you had a good enough power source, you might be the only person in your
neighbourhood able to listen to mp3s after a nuclear war. Although it might
be cheaper to keep a portable mp3 player in a metal box to protect it from
EMP effects.

I haven't worked out how large it would
be, how much power it would consume, or how often a tube would need
to be replaced. But I'd bet that the tube CD player could fit in my
apartment, at least if I removed everything else first.

It would be interesting to look over at some parallel quantum realities &
see how small they've made tubes by now on the worlds where they didn't come
up with transistors.

I'm curious if magnetic relays hooked to variable resistors instead of
simple switches, could have done the job of a signal amplifier before tubes
were invented. Their response time to a change in a signal would be slower
than for a tube, so I don't know if you could make an audio amplifier which
could handle speech clearly.

Skeptic magazine had an interesting article on sound equipment. My
favourite was the beach wood volume knobs which are supposed to give
better sound than plastic ones.

But are they oxygen-free knobs?

We could make some (or claim to have made some). At $1,000 a piece, we don't
have to sell many per year to make a living.

I remember when CDs were fairly new that some people swore they gave
better should if you drew around the outside edge of the CD with a
yellow highlighter pen.

Of course science soon learned better. You have to use a *green*
highlighter pen. Yellow only works on MP3s.

I have serious trouble telling yellow & green highlighters apart. The RGB
colour R-0 G-256 B-0 (green) usually looks almost identical to R-256 G-256
B-0 (yellow). They both look yellow to me. I've taken bilberry extract
recently & had more blueberries in my fruit smoothies recently & the RGB
green above recently actually looked a bit green. I just had a look at those
colours again (LCD screen) and they are definately more distinct from each
other than they used to be.

Karl Johanson
www.neo-opsis.ca
www.youtube.com/user/KarlJohanson42
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48525080175


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