eltonjohn said:There are tubes ,and tubes .Tubes are still used in RF .They can produce hundreds of watts of output power in a very straight forward manner. I used to design 2Kw Commercial broadcast FM transmitters 25 years ago.My emitters were hand crafted .All done by hand with love .Like those italians masters used to make violins .Smith charts .Ceramic Tubes by Varian .matching equations for resonant circuits made of copper piping .Oh those were the days .Forget all about broadband ,all about complicated digital modulating schemes .You could see the power .it made the tubes glow .
No microprocessor any where just a grid current meter .I never felt so alive .
Well anyways.Here we are now .Put some DSPs,some Adc converters ,Some LCD screens and Complex modulating schemes .The sky is the limit .I'm seriuos you can even use them for RADAR systems if you can design FPGA radar signal processing units . So Tubes are not dead .They are just one more toy to me!
Vacuum tube amplifiers had the distortion increasing every day before they completely failed. Some bands replaced the tubes for every show.
They provided little damping to control the resonances of speakers.
Their output transformers rolled off low and high frequencies.
Solid state amplifiers have extremely low distortion and noise. Their performance does not deteriorate and they rarely fail.
Their output impedance is extremely low to control the resonances of speakers.
Their low and high frequency response is excellent.
Solid state amplifiers are not silicone, they are silicon.
Artefacts like this can be found in the "high end" audio segment. I notice, that some serious audio freaks still love (true) tube amplifiers for HiFi. But I don't actually know details of their amps. But they have surely low distortion.The tubes are only for show. People who throw away their money to buy them don't know.
I have seen extremely expensive amplifiers with vacuum tubes glowing on top.
I grew up on 6L6 amplifiers and 807 PA stages which shows how old I'm getting. Sadly, my junk box is now full of microprocessors not glass tubes.
Take a look at this though: YouTube - hand making vacuum tubes Part 1
Some of the best sound recording equipment used tubes (and still do) and many of the greatest albums recorded where done with tube based equipment. Many of these still set the bench mark for how recorded music should sound.
Go into any top recording studio nowdays and you will find tube equipment being used on a regular basis. The Neumann U47 is still the most used vox mic in professional studios, the Fairchild the most sort after and unaffordable compressor, and if the budget allows Themionic Culture one of the first choices of top end new gear. All Tube.
You would also be hard put to find any pro guitarist using an amp that wasn't tube.
Uk Recording Studios in the 50s and 60s
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