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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Are tubed phono stages noisier as a broad sweeping generalization? posted by jjk12 on April 16, 2007 at 15:37:16:
It's easy to be fooled by all kinds of extraneous conditions . . . differences in gain, are the inputs shorted?; are they left open? are they terminated with the right impedence, etc.?At the worst, tubes may produce a "tube rush" (kind of a white noise sound) that transistors don't produce. Any other differences in noise (hum, buzz, etc.) has very little to do with the presence or absence of tubes and everything to do with other elements of the circuit design, the presence or absence of RFI, ground loops, etc. and the circuit's susceptibility to them.
In addition, my experience is that some solid state units exhibit a "gating" effect; that is, a signal below a certain level is simply blocked. This will produce a quiet amplifier, but at the expense of nuance and musical detail.
If you hold a gun to my head and ask me to generalize, I will say that, perhaps, a cheap (under $1,000) transistor phonostage will be quieter than a cheap tube phonostage. However, the tube unit may have less of a "gating" effect (i.e. better low-level linearity) that will produce a musically more satisfying performance.
And that assumes an equal absence of external noise sources like RFI, ground loops and even induced hum from the AC motor and any nearby power cords.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Are tubed phono stages noisier as a broad sweeping generalization? - Bruce from DC 07:43:23 04/17/07 (1)
- Thanks Bruce and all for the .02 /nt\ - jjk12 13:40:18 04/17/07 (0)
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