Propeller Head Plaza

There's another aspect of this issue that may not be immediately obvious, namely

64.231.79.147

In Reply to: RE: But he did measure posted by thetubeguy1954 on January 10, 2008 at 14:30:17

that the whole experiment may not necessarily be very relevant to audio today.
What I mean is that these days many tube amplifiers have evolved beyond sounding like "tube" amplifiers. Now it's certainly true that one can seek out a tube amplifier with euphonic colorations, I'm not saying the market doesn't cater to such things, but when it comes to what is considered the State Of The Art in audio reproduction most would agree, at least I would think so, that transparency and lack of coloration is the name of the game.
Moreover clearly in the elated area of the very best the actual technology, tube or solid state, tends to become secondary to the question of performance which has to do with what the amplifier *doesn't do*, the degree to which it doesn't impose on the music ...lack of coloration, noise, sonic signature, etc.
I actually had a minor demonstration some of this just recently during a manufacturer demonstration of tube amplifiers. The distributor was demonstration his line of Chinese manufactured integrated amplifiers. One of the products, a EL34 based amplifier, most definitely featured euphonic coloration to my mind, and I'll even say that for some music I liked the effect (sound of massed strings), yet I found the signature to be a weakness overall as it tended to interfere with other selections. On the other hand, rather ironically I thought, a SET 300B based amplifier proved to be remarkably transparent with excellent resolution and extension at both frequency extremes; the speakers were inefficient stand mounts so there were limitations with respect to large scale symphonic works, and judging very low bass, but that's another matter.
Anyway back to the point, clearly as many of today's tube amplifiers don't feature overt colorations (to emulate) its seems to me highly unlikely that any crude manipulations of output impedances and what not would yield the high levels of performance (e.g. transparency) of some of today products, tube implementations or otherwise.

Everything matters, don't forget to tweak your placebos!

Edits: 01/10/08 01/10/08

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