High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

Posted by claudej1@aol.com (A) on May 14, 2012 at 07:43:22

In Reply to: RE: What can you do with less than 1 Watt? posted by RC Daniel on May 14, 2012 at 01:48:59

I do not deny the benefits of the "pleasant distortion" characteristics of valves when it comes to the predominance of 2nd order harmonics. They do sound good IN THE TREBLE SECTIONS that way

However generalized my comment might be deemed, it's a been there, done that, for me, too many years ago for with Saul Marantz himself. The lower source impedance of solid state is a better current source and takes better control of any woofer section, even horn loaded ones. so it's not a good move to drive a woofer section with tubes.

What I'm not fond of in the case of tubes is the high operational voltages required, the wear down the insulator components, and the transformers required at the output stages to step down that voltage, the constant replacement of tubes, the warmup period required just to listen to them, the waste of energy required to provide mere MILLIWATTS of power required for good midrange and tweeter, and the frequency response anomalies involved in the interaction between output transformers and passive crossovers feeding voice coils. No thank you. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

On the same note, with the advent of 96Khz sampling and 192 Khz. sampling with 24 bit depth, digital storage is clearly superior to analog in every way but the mainsteam now prefers crappy MP3's for fast download$. Even in the vinyl days, very few producers took full advantange of the medium and simply made good recordings without making drums kits sound 15 feet wide. Dave Brubeck's original 1963 "Take Five" is a good example of good recording.

I'm also not fond of hearing how good "vinyl" is where you drag a rock through a ditch at varying velocities at 20,000 lbs./square inch of pressure on oil well derived material that wears out more and more with each play. I remember how crappy the pressings were in the USA back in the 70's.

Now we have superlative SS amplifiers from exotic class A designs from Nelson Pass, all the way to light weight multi kilowatt amplifiers for PA with high resolution digital Xovers.

Seems silly to me to run power supplies of a few hundred volts on a power amp to end up with stepped down impedance mistmatches that make the output so "load sensitive." But hey, if people think SE tubes sound better, who's going to convince them otherwise. Probably the same people who spend $15,000 for copper cables where it was long ago proven than anything beyond 12 AWG stranded copper was stupidly ridiculous.