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In searching old Stereophiles, I was stunned to see that every Class A pre from Oct '89 was transistor-based.Weren't tubes better (overall) back then ?
Edits: 05/14/15 05/14/15Follow Ups:
Someone has to offer the opinion that there are great tube amps and great solid state amps, and of course lesser-performing versions of each. Every amplifier imparts a sonic signature. I hold on to the hope there was some actual *listening* involved to pick good sounding versions of each, but I doubt it was of much real value.
In the 80's there was a massive swing to SS slimly (good spell-check correction for 'simply,' eh?) due to supply/demand. As the monster manufacturers like Sony and Matsushita went to 100% SS for their billions of consumer products, there was a corresponding massive availability of transistors and engineers to play with them, so 99% of new gear was SS. As the manufacturers "swung" over to SS and the advertising dollars swung, and the mags had boatloads of SS gear to review. They bought into it because they had a gun held to their heads, having to constantly advance the notion that 'newer is better.'
I voted and bought a sweeeeet piece of Nelson Pass SS stuff in that bygone epoch, a Forte preamp that sounds wonderful, amazing in fact. It has been powered on for 25+ years, silent and happy, and has never needed a new set of 6 x $20+ tubes to sound lovely. Tubes became an aficionado thing, realistically. I saw someone using cold-cathode gas filed regulator tubes! Jeez! If you've convinced yourself that you need them for good sound, good luck. Try finding replacements at the local drugstore- look deep under the tube-tester, down there past the bandaid aisle...
Of course, it's about the design that goes in rather than the broad category of devices. I bought my Forte because it sounded lovely. Not because it used transistors or tubes, or anything else. Maybe even op-amps can sound lovely, but I'm not convinced yet- gotta give 'em another decade to shake out.
Nice!!!
Toobs, bigger is better too , 300B anyone....
Edits: 05/29/15
"From the time a person leaves its mother's womb, its every effort is directed towards building, maintaining, and withdrawing into artificial wombs, various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells."
I NEVER READ SO MUCH BULLSHIT IN MY LIFE,,THE CRAP IS SPITTING OUT THE AUTHORS EARS AND EYES,,HEs AN IDIOT..
!
The Mind has No Firewall~ U.S. Army War College.
I think in the mid to late eighty's is when SS started to come into it's own. The previous efforts sounded like crap and SS had a bad reputation that with some still carries on to this day. There are excellent and bad examples of both SS and tubes.....IMHO
I prefer a tubed pre-amp mated to a SS power amp.
Tubes came back on the scene with a vengeance only in the 1990s. The 70s and 80s were dominated by the orthodox engineering crowd and therefore transistors.
I used for many years the Radford SC22 hybrid preamp with a SS power amp until I realised that the pre was coloured and then went to an integrated SS amplifier IMO better sounding and certainly far better value than any antique tube amp..
SS ruled then as now , ML no26, threshold Fet10, JC Vendetta Research, to name a few
Edits: 05/15/15
Vendetta Research, really? Yes it is VERY quiet and VERY dark, to each his own, the reason for so many manufacturers' and choices I suppose, even back then if less so than now.
But I thought we had Audio Research, Conrad-Johnson, Quicksilver, VTL and CAT in the 80s...
Oh, they were there but relatively not well known.
Roger would dis-agree with you ......... :)
The first paragraph is so full of factual mistakes I didn't read the rest.
Fact on that is wrong...there is no such thing as a "highly linear" transistor. Maybe he MEANS that they they are close to theoretical transistor perfection but that is not linear by any means. As it has been noted by a number of writers on the subject, MOSFETS (theoretically) follow a quadratic function and bipolar transistors have an exponential transfer function. Both are far from linear.
Boyk and Sussmann show clearly that even with perfect transistors you will have substantial harmonic distortion even when running Class A, which Sanders clearly does not. For MOSFETS the situation of going from A to B is much worse than for bipolars, which look kind of crappy either way. MOSFETS in Class A are pretty clean...until you add feedback and then weird things happen. MOSFETS in B are ugly, with or without feedback.
Given that Sanders either doesn't really know how transistors work or is speaking marketing speak from the get go doesn't inspire educated reading.
Yep ,there is some of all of dat and more in there, but cant argue , his Magtech amp works , i did look and looked again, still cant see how he is using a fully regulated PSU, dont see it in the case ...
Regardless, the amp is a good piece...
Regards
Edits: 05/26/15
Full regulation probably means only of the input and maybe driver stage. A fully regulated output stage will dissipate as much heat as the output stage itself.
My NAT has a regulated output stage...which is why it has 4 identical heat sink towers rather than only 2. It also weighs more than double the Sanders amp to make "only" 100 watts.
The CAT preamp was rated the best in 89 by TAS. it's a tube pre.
I doubled-checked the list - it was 4 out of 5 that were solid-state.
CJ Premier 7 was the only tube - no mention of CAT...
Both John Atkinson and Robert Reina used Audio Research preamps as their reference during that period of time. That was recently mentioned in the SP20 review found here.
During the 80s, I preferred the lesser SP6 to the Mark Levinson JC-2, Dayton-Wright SPA, etc.
Opus 33 1/3
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