OK, they were obsolete for high fidelity reproduction of recorded music. As an effect they are of course great fun. I love my DIY tweed champ clone. I have several other tube guitar amps but, to be honest, I doubt I could tell the difference from a good digital emulation ... ;-)
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Tortuga TPB.V1 Tube Preamp Buffer Review
- Thread starter amirm
- Start date
Lets test a tube guitar amp? Hard to imagine it can get much more worse.
What about a shure 520 green bullet mic? The more distortion, the more mojo in your amplified harmonica.
Just isn't the money in it any more. As much as I hate the Upscale Audio guy for various reasons, he made a point in his video about the KT150 that I agreed with: "They don't throw anything out. If it turns on, it goes out the door." They can't afford to cull much of their production because they'd lose their shirts.
Anyway... Of all the manufacturers, JJ at the moment is the most consistent IME, but only if you buy through a seller that tests every tube that comes through their door - e.g. Eurotubes.
Huh? WTF does the 1980s have to do with tube sound, and 'old peeps'?
You mean you weren’t listening to Madonna and Gary Numan on an ST 70? You missed out
Its all about mojo....or cowbells.
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
I have a ST 70, among other amps, but I did classical, jazz, blues. I don't even know who Gary Numan is.You mean you weren’t listening to Madonna and Gary Numan on an ST 70? You missed out
Once you get into expensive tube gear, the difference between tubes & emulators is obvious. If people knew what was done to a recording at the recording/mixing/mastering stage, they wouldn't bother trying to achieve perfection.... because recording studios don't. With digital playback, the ONLY figure you should worry about (to make your ears happy) is clock jitter (I'm not going to go into the argument of why here).
Robin L
Master Contributor
Not in my experience. The bad was the transport, and the willingness of these transports to eat the tiny tapes. If the transport needed repair, all you could do was replace the transport. That cost as much as the DAT recorder all by itself. The next bad thing was the built-in ADCs. But I got good sonic results using an outboard ADC, mid-nineties. Modern hand-held recorders with storage on a tiny chip makes so much more sense.
Back to the subject at hand: I had only a short time recording with a Reel to Reel machine, not a good one. There was a step-up in sound quality with the Technics DAT recorder I was using. But the top end was nastier sounding than I could live with, so I was using tube gear to attempt to smooth the high frequencies. The MX-10 ultimately proved useless, anything happening on the electrical line would land on the signal. A number of recordings made with the MX-10 at locales with dimmer switches were ruined. Moved on to a Mackie at a certain point. I had tube microphones, early Schoeps small diaphragm condensers. Quite noisy, subject to overload, very fragile. They didn't last long, moved on to Neumanns with op-amps. I did use the outboard two-channel starved-tube microphone pre-amp, It was a useful "tone control". But ultimately I stopped recording in the late nineties. I know there's "audiophile " recordings using tube microphone preamps still being made these days, it's mentioned a number of times each month over at Analog Planet, Stereophile and Hi-Fi Choice.
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
The tubes I had were JJ, but from Amazon. I seriously doubt that they were 'tested'. In this case it was easy enough to test 10, select 2, and return the rest. The measured distortions were all over the map.
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Yeah, if you've got a tester you trust that makes perfect sense. If you don't (like me), I'll let the people with Amplitrexes and RoeTest curve tracers do it!
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
Actually I did this with REW, doing a sweep electronically gives a nice plot of the distortion products verses frequency.Yeah, if you've got a tester you trust that makes perfect sense. If you don't (like me), I'll let the people with Amplitrexes and RoeTest curve tracers do it!
MakeMineVinyl
Major Contributor
Its a balanced circuit - these cancel 2nd order harmonic distortion (and all even order) which originates in the circuit.
Get two of them. Cheaper and even more mojo.
https://m.thomann.de/de/ibanez_ts9_tube_screamer.htm
https://m.thomann.de/de/ibanez_ts9_tube_screamer.htm
Ken1951
Major Contributor
What happens to the little pile of electrons after they've been sanded off? Collect in the corner, smoke cigarettes and sing doo-wop?
So your position is that it doesn’t sound “warm” but rather actually makes the room warmer due to heat emissions from the tubes!
Come on Amir, please listen to this one and share your impressions! Also, looking at the poor performance makes me wonder if Paul from PS Audio designed this lovely buffer. ASR exposes another flawed design. I’d love to hear comments from the manufacturer. It would be interesting to get his perspective.
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