Tube vs Solid State Amplifiers: Which Sound Best?

welcome back my YouTube friends it is Sunday night 11:30 p.m. close to Christmas we're about a week and a half away and I was just telling Matthew that I want to have a debate about amplifiers two verse solid state Matthew what's your preference which one's better and why let's talk about that let's enrage people in the chat here let's get their opinions let us discuss sounds good to me I'm sure that whatever we come up with they'll disagree and that's fine yeah okay well I mean put it this way nobody's wrong and nobody's right it really at the end of the day it depends on your preference but I will tell you this we do have a slide show we're gonna go over I know there's a lot of people out there that still love tube amplifiers in fact if you go to some of the two channel audio shows like we went to the Florida Expo back in February over in Clearwater VA see was like a big sponsor of the show and virtually every one of their rooms had tube amplifiers and I have to tell you I was enamoured by how gorgeous they were the fact that they were locally made in Sarasota Florida I wouldn't have even thought about checking them out until I actually got into the room and saw how beautiful they were and this is big buck stuff I mean this stuff's not cheap but on the speaker systems that they were playing I mean it just everything sounded great and I know that tubes kind of have a stigma for having higher noise higher Distortion I didn't find anything unpleasant other than the price of what they were asking for these products well handmade you know in in the United States most of these products are either point-to-point or probably low production circuit boards tubes they're not as prevalent as they used to be and they cost a whole lot more than transistors so you add all that up at a pretty case it gets expensive quick yeah so you know before we get into this YouTube discussion here's here's what my thoughts are on tube or solid-state the advantages of solid-state there's really a lot of advantages number one they are more reliable there's nobody that can argue that a solid-state amplifier will last longer generally than a tube amp the tubes you have to replace quite often where solid state you really don't the book the only thing you have to do with a solid state ample time maybe is recap the power supply now there are two decades because there are electrolytic caps and you have the same kind of problem anyways what either amplifier to be honest exactly a electrolytic cap Shh it's just an issue it's just yeah so you know the reliability is better generally on solid state amplifiers they're generally more efficient they're generally more compact they have more ability to give you power for its size ratio and we'll talk more about the distortion profiles and everything else I'm going to basically pull up your slide presentation so the one thing the one thing I would say I do like about tubes is you have the ability to kind of transform your sound a little bit more with a tube amplifier and if people like to use equipment as a tone control that's your cup of tea I'll just leave that out there we'll talk about that more as we go through the slides do you see my screen right now I do yeah if you can go ahead and start the show so it's actually the full screen on the slide though yes I know I have the deal where's your net I don't really uh I think you do something up can you undo what you did okay let me reopen oh it's okay hold on I'll shot stop the screen show sorry guys I'm like done with PowerPoint it's been years since I've really been using this I should probably just start doing the slides for you that would be a good idea but I'm gonna reopen it so tell me what your thoughts are oh yeah before you even did the research that I asked you to did you find anything different than what you thought originally uh not really I was really hoping to find some more definitive articles that had done maybe even like random I like a double blind not randomized control but double blind studies basically or ABX testing of two versus solid state that was more around perceptions of the differences not just being able to hear a difference this is actually like mooshri testings like that that you can do and I was hoping there might be something like that couldn't really find exactly that not with two bands versus salad today mostly it was stuff where people had modified signals to sound like a tube versus solid state but you know it was it was good to be able to pull these articles out and kind of see in some ways I mean I found articles that were published in the last five ten years still discussing differences in tube amps so that you know tell me something you know what's funny is that the pictures you chose in the slide presentation you chose two amplifiers the Macintosh on the left being solid state and the vac v AC on the right be and tube both amplifiers you chones happen to have transformers on the outputs I thought that was interesting that you chose that I really just grabbed some pictures and you know I've always thought Mac amps for pretty that they're they're actually local to where I'm from originally and Binghamton New York and it's always been one of my favorite looking you know the big blue meters on the front was was always iconic but yeah we can talk about output transformers too there they have their issues yes they do so let's move on here tube sound different from solid-state I don't think anybody would argue that yeah I mean I think what it well and here's why I said this I think a lot of times you hear people talk about amplifiers and they say well look all amplifiers within their linear range sound the same and we've proven this well all amplifiers that are operating the way they're supposed to I mean at the time that that idea was really being pushed we were talking it was because solid-state amplifiers had basically come of age they had gotten to a point where they measured extremely well they sounded good and they had started to achieve that straight wire with gain concept that was being pushed and so people were saying look at this point any of these amplifiers whether it's a hundred-dollar amplifier a $5000 amplifier if it all measures within a certain realm of realistic good performance we're going to say they all sound the same and that's not absolutely true there are things that you can hear that can be different and tubes basically have so much distortion that to try to argue that a tube amplifier sounds the same as a solid-state amplifier is not really true and the other thing is that tube amplifiers for a lot of reasons with the out transform being one of them are highly reactive so the frequency response changes so when you call it a tone control it's true and as a result they tend to sound different from solid state and one of the things that people often describe is that they have a warmer sweeter sound and I've owned lots of tube amps over the years and I would absolutely agree that at least of a certain type they do tend to have that warmer sweeter sound solid-state is often said to sound more detailed you know in the term detail is you got to kind of define what that really means in technical terms but again there's reasons to believe that would be true tube tubes often or thought of his vintage I mean they're old and there is definitely some nostalgia out there the whole reason I got into tube amps was I wanted to learn how amplifiers worked so a friend of my parents when I was a kid had said that I should buy a tube amp an old one and fix it up so he had specifically recommended the old I think it was the Dinoco st 70 and he said you know buy one of these they were kits back and like maybe the 70s and he said you know rebuild it so I did that to learn how those amps worked I later rebuilt an audio research it was a D 70s and built some single-ended triode amps and all that and it was good to kind of get a basic sense because the tube amp amplifier circuit designs are actually very basic so if you want to understand how an amplifier works it's not a bad place to start solid-state is current technology it's the future you know it's we're not gonna come back into tubes again at some point we're basically keep progressing with where we're at and there's a good reasons for that but there is huge debate over which one sounds better and I know you know what's funny when you're talking about how you're learning about amplifiers by building or rebuilding a tube amp yeah I went through basically five or six years of engineering school and never learned to think about a tube because they don't teach tubes and I graduate now college I graduated in 96 I think 96 97 something like that and yeah tubes were not even taught in my generation when I went to engineering school so just to let you guys know about that yeah and I think you know that my I originally wanted to go into engineering so my first year of school I also did Electrical Engineering and we didn't do anything with tubes either I mean those were long dead by then I think four people want to learn how under amplifiers work basically an amplifier can be thought of as a set of blocks gain stages basically that serve certain purposes one is designed to take the input well and essentially amplify that and there's another stage usually designed to amplify the voltage and the final stage designed to amplify the current and so two beams do this in a very basic sense there's another thing we can get into I suppose so transistors that you have pairs NPN and PNP and you can design a push-pull amplifier very easily that way with tubes there's no such things so if you want to do that except fuse a phase splitter so again when you start to study these amplifiers if you start with tubes it teaches you things that you might not actually understand fundamentally if you go straight to solid state because it's sort of taken care of for you if you will sure so it's it's probably not the right way to learn how to design amplifiers but for me as a kid that was tinkering it was a good start yeah we can go on so why do tubes sound different well primarily it's in the distortion which is what I mentioned earlier so tubes produce basically a lot more low order distortion and they tend to have higher amounts of even order Distortion this isn't always true so I gotta say I'm talking about tubes very generally here it's actually the amplifier topology that causes this and the use of negative feedback or not tubes in and of themselves can be utilized in a linear fashion with less negative feedback then can solid-state devices so tube amps were traditionally and have continued to be designed often with low or no global feedback in the design and often not a lot of local feedback so just to interrupt you there if they're not using much feedback the bandwidth must be pretty limited compared to a solid-state it yes so the bandwidth typically was more limited and the distortion rise looks different I mean and it's not ideal either as with width so the but over time tube amp designs came out that actually did include feedback and they moved from what originally were single ended triode designs which were a Class A approach then they started moving into various forms of like push-pull designs which is what pretty much all solid-state amplifiers are and so if you actually get a modern-day take if you will on like a state-of-the-art class a/b push pool tuba amplifier you'll actually see that much of its performance actually looks more like a solid stadium squad with higher odd order distortion and a rise in higher order distortion in general so I'm saying this but the reality is really talking about is single entity triode and some of the other popular you know kind of related class a tube amp designs which are pretty simpler versus really these push-pull class a/b designs which are what for the most part all solid-state is today and then the transfer function of a tomb amp which is essentially like all the information about its frequency response its distortion its phase etc tends to have aspects of it which you might describe as likely to sound pleasant I don't want to say it's not better in the sense that it's got errors in it but if you have to make certain errors these are errors you would tend to find to be not so bothersome you know and it's basically low order distortion for instance especially second order tends to be pretty benign and even when it's high and you can hear it it doesn't tend to sound bad because it's related to the music itself it's you know the harmonics are musical basically so so maybe that's what maybe that's why in sound production maybe that's why guitarists and such prefer two bands over the solid stay amps yeah I mean I play guitar I'm pretty into tube amps for guitar I think there's a little more to it than that I mean it is yes the distortion but you referred to it earlier as like a tone control I mean the stuff that I do if my two guitar amps are there's nothing pure about the sound at all it's highly distorted yeah it's it's you know I'm using if the other thing James was over earlier James Larson and we were talking about guitar speakers and how like really good guitar speakers are actually really horrible speakers you know and it's the same issue it's like that sound you're trying to recreate is essentially something that's completely nonlinear and very overloaded everything is so we should make the caveat to everybody that there's a difference between sound production actually making music and recording music versus sound reproduction and trying to play it back yeah and you wouldn't want to introduce that same Distortion you know like the guitar in the recording already if I play guitar and I record it all the sound though I want you to hear is already in the sound I've created if you then take an amp that has that same essentially non-linearity to it and add it on top of what I did you're changing what I've created it won't be the same so you actually want a pure system to reproduce the very non pure sound that I created correct so do tube sound better than solid-state so if you take that idea that as I said the distortion tends to be more pleasant and it tends to be more like I said the low even order solid-state you know potentially has more higher-order distortion more of the stuff that tends to be unpleasant wouldn't that imply the tubes are better well it's not that simple and it's really not the correct way to look at this so there's very little research unfortunately that's been done to really study the issues between tube and solid-state I suppose it's not so too bad because what exactly what they would find I think what they would find is that solid stadiums basically can be made to perform significantly better now there has been some blinded research that's looked at people looking at tube amps and solid-state and occasionally some of those studies have found that people prefer the sound of the tube amp which is not the same as saying it's better and it's not the same as saying that it's pure it just means that when they were asked which one they liked the sound of better sometimes there was a significant difference and suggesting they liked the sound of the tube amp better and I would argue it's probably because again if you're gonna add errors better to add errors that sound Pleasant than Dan terrors that sound unpleasant but solid-state amps when designed properly really do appear to be technically better the distortion profile of two amplifiers like I said has aspects of it that might sound better but for the most part we've gotten to a point with solid stadiums where we can make them so that the distortion profile is not even a consideration because it's so low it's not audible and we'll talk about that later yeah all right so one of the things to keep in mind is we really I think is an industry and many of us as consumers get distortion wrong so in the picture that you see back there you can see essentially it was two correlations that were done on distortion we talked about THD total harmonic distortion and we talked about the audibility of total harmonic distortion we often make claims that are a little bit misleading so there's actually been probably at this point I'd say at least a half dozen studies that have been done to look at the correlation between common distortion metrics like THD and IMD so total harmonic distortion intermodulation distortion and how people perceive that as you know in terms of sound quality well what you can see in this graphic is that there is absolutely no correlation between THD and people's perceive sound quality so basically the argument that that there's some threshold for instance of THD at which it sounds bad or like you can't hear it anymore isn't really accurate there is a point there has to be a point where THD would be so low you couldn't hear it anymore but the issue is that it's not about the number of key HT which is a composite but actually the makeup of that composite that matters and so one of the problems is that the lower the order of distortion is the more likely it is to be masked and even ordered distortion which tends to be more musical sounding also is more pleasant so then what that means is that when you want to create a composite score of distortion and correlate it with people's perceptions of the sound quality you need to wait higher-order distortion is worse and you also need to wait odd order distortion as worse and a higher order is much worse than odd like a third harmonic for instance is not as good as the second harmonic but a let's just like the sake of our bit a six harmonic is still much worse than a third harmonic right so it's important that that higher-order stuff is weighted pretty heavily so people have created metrics for doing that and then the PTH D that you see on the right of that image you can see a very high correlation it was actually over 0.9 in that particular study so what what that tells us is that this obsession with THD really doesn't tell us a lot about amplifier performance and one of the reasons why probably people think tube amplifiers sound better is that if you use a metric like P THD what you would find is that while the distortion is higher in tube amps it's often of a kind that's more benign than what you would see in solid-state amps excepting that sells stadiums can be again with distortion so low that it's not even a concern question for you and I don't know if you can answer this and that but it's something to think about if you've got a tube amp like you said that has low even order harmonics and low the the higher order harmonics are pretty low but then if you get a solid-state amp it has let's say a lot of odd order harmonics and the upper harmonics are high or you can see the modest scope but really the THD levels or the spikes that you see on the FFT are lower on the solid-state amped and they are on the tube amp let's not also forget that a solid-state probably has a lower noise floor than the two them so you can see those harmonics better would the end users still prefer the tube amp would the tube amp still be more desirable despite the fact that the distortion profile looks better but all the distortion components of the solid-state are lower than the tube amp well and I think the answer to that would be it would just depend on how high those higher-order distortion harmonics actually are in terms of amplitude and in frequency you know if we're talking about something like it's got very high odd order higher odd order or let's say distortions and we're looking at everything above 10 kilohertz while all those harmonics are inaudible because they're well outside the spectrum right or the other thing which I pointed out here if the harmonics are higher there than other harmonics but we're talking about them still being below let's say minus 110 100 decibels they're not going to probably be audible either because even if you were listening at a hundred decibels it means those harmonics are falling at or below zero decibels which is the that's like you know that's the hearing threshold of human that under pure conditions that would be the best you build to achieve typically so it it would depend if in those two scenarios the tube amplifier let's say still had a THD level of little disappoint 1% and it was predominantly second-order Distortion but the solid-state amplifier had a distortion level of I don't know point oh one percent but it was predominantly 5th order and above that was driving that number up that amp probably would sound worse than the tube amp but if you're talking about a solid-state amplifier that has a torsion level of point zero zero one percent well at that point we're talking about distortion levels being so low it's very unlikely any of this gonna be audible right right yeah all right so subjectively what is going on with tube amps already got into this a little bit but I want to make that point that it's not really about tuber solid state it's really more about things like single-ended versus push-pull designs and the amount of feedback that's being used and how it's being used solid stadiums allowed for a different kind of amplifier topology over what was being used in tube amplifiers and what dominated before and that fundamentally changed things like the distortion profile in the amp the other thing that can matter is how you're using the tubes is it set up as a triode amp is it a pentode amp it's that those are the output devices it would be used versus solid-state devices which were as I mentioned with solid-state we moved to something where we had pairs NPN and PNP which meant the amplifier didn't need to have a phase splitter in order to be a push-pull design all of this really changed things quite a bit and we don't realize that often when we're talking about two vs. solid-state in fact for me as somebody who's played around with a lot of tube amps one of the things that kind of shocked me was I wanted to get tube amps because I wanted to hear that you know people talked about like 300 B type output tubes being used in the single-ended triode amps and the sound they made and I wanted that but I wanted more power so I remember buying to forget what it was I think it was actually that audio research d70 which is actually uses a phase splitter and it's a push-pull design with 6550 tubes in it and that particular amplifier I remember it didn't sound anything like what I heard described it actually basically sounded like a solid Stadium to me what's because it was very similar to a solid-state amp it's design was more in line with that so I think it's important to remember that now go ahead gene oh it's just interesting let you say like the better the tube amp gets the more it behaves like a solid state yeah and then what actually happens over time is you do get to the point where operating within its linear range it'll ne it'll basically sound like any other solid stadium which they all tend to sound pretty similar if not the same the differences for me for instance amongst most outstayed amps tends to mostly be at limit behavior and noise floor everything in the middle I don't really hear a difference sure yeah so does this mean tube amps sound better I think we've already kind of beaten this dead horse but no I don't think this means tube amps down they sound different and I get that some people like that but better is a subjective term let's just let's just say that there's a better chance that you will hear differences in tube amps than you will in solid state amps mostly I in my opinion it all has to do with output impedance and the fact that the frequency responsible vary depending on the load that it's driving so there's a synergy when people talk about all you got to get synergy between your speakers and your amplifier and your preamp and some people go far enough into the lunacy of about cables but when I could when I could have jump off that cliff here but the fact that the synergy comments were so prevalent decades ago and they're still around in the audiophile community is really because you have an amplifier that has a varying its load variant it's frequency response is load variance and in my opinion as an engineer who's designed communication systems you don't want to have load variance you want to have the ability to drive the same voltage regardless of the load impedance and you're never really gonna get to that level with a tube map that you could what solid-state yeah you're right I mean it's not a desirable trait and it's a it's an inevitable artifact of the fact of the way tube amps have to be designed including the fact that they use output transformers in order to change the output impedance which is really really high with tubes down to something lower for driving speakers before and a tonne loads and then you know ultimately what that does if you look at like a reactive load because again a speaker is not a resistive load so a speaker is not four ohms or a dome so even forgetting the fact that when you test with dummy loads you see a change in the frequency response from that that's still a resistive load that you're testing with we don't I don't think we I don't think you do this at least Jean but I've seen John Atkinson at stereo file does usually include in his measurements of tube amplifiers the forum the a on the 16 ohm frequency response with any ads in a reactive load frequency response and so if anybody wants to go look those up you can see for yourself that typically these tube amplifiers have a response that's very wavy and uneven and essentially that's what it's doing to your speaker is it's adding it's not adding like roll off it's actually adding an Jin the frequency response throughout it's like adding an EQ that you just kind of played with randomly now I want to interject maybe a couple of slides ahead but it's just when I'm thinking about what you're saying here about how this is changing frequency response and not necessarily a roll off it could cause frequency peaking this reminds me very much of some of the poor designs I've seen with Class D yeah so Class D amplifiers tend to have a similar problem and part of it cut and it's not true of all Class D amplifiers which is important to keep in mind and I've added a slide for that but a lot of Class D amplifiers today and especially early ones because of the output filters that were used and then the overall design are highly reactive basically or the the response changes dramatically with reactive loads so not only do you see changes with you know four eight 16 ohms you also see changes with the reactive load because again speakers are not purely resistive so it's not that's not a good thing either but today there are companies out there and we can talk about this later that have designed Class D amplifiers that are basically as good as Class A B in that regard and they they don't tend to change with different impedances or a reactive load and the huge advantage of the Class D is the efficiency that approaches 90 percent sometimes even higher right as opposed to the best Class E V which at full load on Class A B if it's designed well you can get close to about 70 percent efficiency sure right and I think with most I mean of course with Class say you can be significant below that I think with tube amps Class A B you're probably looking at closer to fifty fifty-five percent and most of those designs they're a little bit lower tubes themselves or sart's there's a reason why tubes can heat your room up basically so yeah so you're not gonna be using tube amps if you're do a multi-channel surround in most cases it's just the channel density is not there with tubes you're gonna dissipate too much power take up too much space it's just not practical yeah I I've seen people do that I mean I've owned as I said tube amps on and off over the years I've had times where I had to three at the same time one of the things I always hated about them was that they in any normal listening room they would heat the room up to uncomfortable levels quickly and I felt like you had to install like custom ventilation just to make the room you know usable with these things you know so one of the things to keep in mind is that as many people will say speakers are the biggest source of distortion in any system I mean they always are the best performing speakers that are of the lowest Distortion still typically when they get into the upper end of the output are producing an excess of at least 1% if not more and many speakers are producing much more than that especially in the bass even at very low volume levels you're still looking at 0.1% or higher I mean you'll never see a speaker at least I don't think we're gonna see any time soon speakers I have like 0.001 percent THD for instance yeah it's a mechanical device or good luck with that right and so one of the things people argue is well doesn't that mean that whatever the amplifiers distortion is doesn't really matter because the speaker is gonna dominate it well the problem with that is that we're not talking about something like constant noise where if you just add two constant noises together they would be additive or and so if you were to add four if you took something that's for instance ninety DVDs of pink noise and you took something else and it's 50 DBS of pink noise and you add them together that 90 DBS dominates the 50 DBS is not going to add anything meaningful and you wouldn't hear that but that's not how distortion works because distortion is actually made up in the case of THD of harmonics so if these harmonics are different from each other and certainly the amp harmonics and the speaker harmonics would potentially be different from each other the profile of distortion basically of a speaker and an amplifier are not going to look the same then what that means is that you can in fact actually hear some of the distortions of amplifiers through the distortion of the speaker and there again there's been studies that have looked into this and shown this to be true gene you would actually mentioned that that you know some related things are that you can often hear certain noises below a noise floor and that of course is known to be true as well yeah I mean I did work back in my government days in anechoic chambers to the isolate secured and unsecured audio and even though the noise the audio that was unsecure was bleeding it to the secure Channel it was below the noise floor you could still clearly hear in a controlled listening environment through IEMs yeah and one of the things that's interesting speakers tend to produce mostly second and third-order distortion they don't tend to produce a lot of higher-order distortions unless the speaker's malfunctioning whereas amplifiers especially when they start to clip tend to produce a lot of harmonics throughout in fact modern solid-state amplifiers with very low levels of distortion you'll still see second and third order often to being the loudest but they're all it's like what you tend to see is the higher order stuff stands to actually be close and level almost to I mean once you get past second and third order at least they all tend to be kind of close in level and so when an amp starts clipping all this distortion kind of rises up across all the harmonics pretty dramatically and so the at limit behavior of an amplifier can become important because you'll easily it could still be below that of the speaker and you'll easily hear it so is it a myth or do you think it's true that people claim that tube amps when they clip they clip much smoother and they sound more they sound more cohesive than when a solace they dam clips it's absolutely true there's a technical reason for why that is and you really there's there's actually two things going on so one is that because most tube amps don't use feedback they tend to naturally rise in distortion as to get close to their clipping point if you will and so what you see is more like a wedge shape it just sort of keeps rising higher and higher and higher whereas with push-pull high feedback amplifier designs what you tend to see instead is an e so basically the distortion is just flat out over a pretty long wide period of output and then it hits a point where all of a sudden it starts to rise dramatically and you see almost a straight line up as the distortion increases so it's a hard clipping point whereas the tube amp is sort of slowly doing that so feedback is one part of it the other is that it's this is not exactly the right way to put this but we'll put it this way and you make it easy amplifiers have a rail voltage they swing up and down how high that rail voltage is times basically how much current can be produced by the power supply indicates how much output the amplifier would be able to produce in theory assuming everything gets you know translated there well with a tube amplifier you don't have the current but you have extremely high rail voltages I mean actually had I had a single-ended triode amp I built once that used radio transmitter tubes and I think there were 805 so people want to look those up and that particular amplifier was capable of producing something like 30 or 40 watt single-ended class-a and it used thousand volt rails like so we're talking extremely high so that thing if you looked at its distortion behavior basically the way it would click would be again like I mentioned just the distortion just keeps getting higher and higher as it gets louder but there's no knee ever there's never a change in shape it's just a wave oh a wedge so so that argument is correct it is true that they have this sort of more linear if you will a more gradual clipping behavior and that does sound more pleasant I mean I think there's even been companies like nad and others over the years who have introduced circuits to try to force a solid-state amped to clip differently so that they tend to sound more like a tube amp would and it's important to note that you know a typical tube amp let's say it's 50 watts and it's clipping at 55 watts um you're not getting a solid-state amp at such low power levels these days I mean if you buy a separate amplifier you're probably gonna get a 200 watt amp the tube amp can never approach those power levels so you're never gonna drive if you're comparing both amps at the same power level you're never gonna get a more pleasing distortion out of salt and of ice cube amp versus the solid state amp at the same power level right well it nestled so my fix to this problem has always been you get bigger amps so that's why I have big ears because I I just don't want him to clip ever you know so so which is better we said this at the beginning look this is your system is supposed to be enjoyable to you if you like tube amps and they sound better to you and that brings you more enjoyment I think all the power to you should go buy them on the other hand if what you're really looking at is you want a system that is in an absolute sense the most technically accurate system you can have it reproduces the music the way it was let's say intended to be reproduced salads Ava's gonna be better there's just no getting around that and the best salad stadiums today are really really good to the point that I don't think that they're producing much of anything that is causing any sort of you know and I Drive there's no sound drawback it's not the bottle of good now let's put it that way but I think the only thing you could argue with the tube amps is that I you know tube amps some people feel like it brings them more joy so you know hey all the power to you well not to go off-topic but it's very similar to the debate of turntables versus digital analog versus digital analog is a terrible storage device and on paper CDs is technically superior to vinyl yet I still listen to vinyl records I still like the warm feeling I get I still like some of the distortion you get the snaps the crackles and I don't know it's just it's you feel the music more you're more connected to the music so it's a subjective thing even though I know it's technically not as accurate as digital I still won't give up playing vinyl records yeah I hear you I I have a record player I actually don't use it that much but I do have a record player in plenty records so why is mr. T looking at us pitties the fool but let's so this is let's not fool ourselves here this is going back to the way just because there are things that tube amps do that we could argue is better than the way a solid-state amp nothing's gonna change the fact that even under best conditions these two bands with these particular circuit designs that allow for this more pleasant distortion is still producing audible Distortion solid city amps at this point can be designed such that they do not produce audible distortion and so it it's it we can't fool ourselves into thinking that these tube amps are somehow providing us with a more accurate picture of the music they're not I like to Balaam's as I said I'm all my guitar amps or tube amps I still believe that that makes sense for guitars I've owned plenty of tube amps over the years for music I've enjoyed listening to them they can make a very pleasant sounding system but they're not technically better that's just it's a different approach that colors the sound and sometimes that's okay but not if what you're looking for is accuracy well we'd like to look towards the future so with the fact that we're doing at most now and we're doing on average at least 11 channels to do a full atmo system sometimes up to 32 channels you're not gonna shove 32 channels of amplification of tube amplifications into a rack you're not even in some cases you're not even gonna do class a/b anymore because it generates a lot of heat you got to use a lot of power Class D is the future it's here and there are at least three topologies of class-d that I think are excellent is very as as every bit as good as the best Class A B and I'll just tell you one of them is hype XD other one is Pascale and now the latest generation of ice modules are all excellent amplifiers yep and I'll put a little I'll give my friend a little bit of a advertisement if you will here but cherry amplifiers also has their own topology that's designed to essentially compete with those it's a higher they would argue it to higher end topology than all of them and provides pretty similar performance more to what you get from the high-tech Sankore so but again all of these do something important which is better than pretty much everything else out on the market so Class D am sore a mixed bag there's no denying that and there's gonna be a lot of people are gonna be like I've listened to Class D they sound terrible yeah a lot of Class D does sound terrible Class D brought back a lot of old problems that had long been solved and Class A B amplifiers I mean I've got even in my rack right now I use it for one of my subwoofers a Class D amplifier that's noise floor is audible it's and the thing is they've had really clean low noise Class A B amplifiers since the 70s at this point so the fact that a late-2000s Class D amplifier has audible noise is not great they started having distortion levels were like THD was 0.5 percent basically at any power level I mean it was awful I would also argue and this might be a topic for another video I'm not a hundred percent sure that Class D reliabilities up to Class A B standards if you look yeah I've had so many subwoofers plate amplifiers died on me and they're all Class D and it can't be a coincidence there has to be something I don't know if it's the parts that they're using or if there's some something that's not optimized at least in subwoofer amplifiers that are Class D but they fail quite often so if you're buying a subway should try to get a subwoofer that has a 5 year warranty on the electronics and I haven't I mean this technology hasn't been big long enough for me to I've owned any to even kind of give but I've had play damn failures too I've had admittedly I've had some class IV play done failures as well over the years but I I think I think you're right I think the very high switching speed and I also think that they're kind of engineering these things more to the edge a lot of Class A B especially like audiophile amps basically using big three through-hole parts that were kind of overkill and then with Class D a lot of this stuff is surface mount devices they're tiny they're their temperature ratings are often closer to the operating temperature of this of the whole system so everything's kind of operating a little bit more at the edge in that regard I think you're probably right but anyway back to this I think that as much as there's a lot of bad about Class D there's a major good and that major good is that efficiency if all you've got is a two channel system fine there's probably you know there's there's some really good Class D out there anyway that sounds great but you know there's plenty of good Class A B but when we're talking about any of these modern 13 plus channel systems I have three dedicated outlets in my home theater I still couldn't provide through big Class A B amplifiers enough power to a 13 plus channel system if I wanted to drive that Full Tilt with big powerful subs as well so one of the nice advantages of using Class D is that you essentially get significantly more of that power out of your outlets to use for your speakers and I think this is a must at this point and then the other part you mentioned which was that Class D am sure in cooler and we're sticking an awful lot of amp channels in a pretty small chassis receivers can't get any bigger yep so just to give you guys a comparison if you do if you have a dedicated 20 amp line and you're doing a typical Class A B set up you're gonna at best get about 1400 watts out of that outlet whereas if you do in a Class D design you're gonna get over 2,000 watts 2,100 Watts out of that outlet just switching to Class D so there's you definitely get more overhead if you get get a good Class D design that's got low noise that doesn't that's not load variance that actually maintains a frequency response similar to whatever load impedance it drives you're doing yourself a favor if I go in Class D because that's yeah that's that's the future well in that last slide you can see that in the right corner there was an image that I had taken from I think it was Audio Science Review but if somebody had actually measured on an audio precision the end core NC 400 which is what that amplifier is there which is one of these new generations of amplifiers particularly from high pecks the distortion at this point is so low it couldn't possibly be audible we're talking like not 0.001 percent but like 0.0001 percent kind of thing the signal to noise ratio is typically better than 120 decibels the frequency response on these things the the bandwidth on them basically is is like let's say five Hertz on up to 40 50 60 kilohertz are better the amplifiers response doesn't really change much at all with different loads so it's not you know reactive loads don't really cause issues for it and even the regular hype X amps are pretty darn good but these are that much better as you mentioned Pascal has some pretty good ones too that also have pretty good performance it's not quite as good but it's it's not not far off and then ice power certainly has gotten better there's I will say this there's still some ice power modules that are current but they're actually really should only be used for subs so the thousand watt model from them that's a sub-module that should not be used with or the ice modules that were used in the first generation of pioneers that use the yeah they were terrible they just they fell apart at forum loads yep so anyway I think people need to accept though that Class D is the future and there's lots of good reasons to use them I'm a fan to be honest I've heard lie I mean I've heard lots of bad ones I don't like those but there's some really good ones out there their technical performance is excellent I've listened to him I think they sound great yeah you guys have a lot you know that we're in a marvelous time to be an audiophile because there's so many options out there and the technology is generally getting better and less expensive when it comes to amplification of course but also with speakers we talked about that all the time how you can get speaker performance now that you couldn't get twenty years ago at price points that are you know most people could afford so it's just it's awesome and we're getting into multi-channel music now more so I mean there's just a lot of pros here my so we're not here to fight you or to choose one amplifier technology over the other but to use them within the limits that make sense and make sense to me cool well guys I think we're gonna wrap this up I hope you found this information useful please put your questions down below and matthew loves going in there I'm gonna volunteer and he goes in there he's the fastest texture I've ever seen he could give you a book report answer in seconds I don't know how the guy does it but like that's okay you have the fastest thumbs in the West my friend yeah guys don't forget to Like us hit the bell notification so you get notifications when we go live or when I put produce new videos and join our patreon at patreon.com slash audio holics I'm gonna be putting all of our slideshows into one article that only patreon members get access to so it's great reference going in the future when you want to look at the stuff you want to take it at your own leisure and just look at each slide and kind of recap what we talked about so Matthew thanks for being here tonight yeah I'll write my friends until next time keep listening

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 113,171

Keywords: amplifiers, tube amplifiers, solid-state amplifiers, hi-fi

Id: JT1iqlPMAnA

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019