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Posted by Dominic on
01-17-2007
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I had a little flash a few days ago thinking about potential.
I've been following more high tech gadgets lately, things like the iPhone. And pondering ideal audio setups from the erspective of design and ergonomics. This had me thinking about solidstate music files and opamps and like things. Reminding myself that there isn't much point if it doesn't sound good my thoughts flowed onto the 47labs stuff and tube buffered gainclones (because of an implementation i had drawn up) and the clean implementation of a Simon Yorke. The important things were the amps as far as this train of thought goes.
Tube buffer? WTF? I suddenly realised that the whole idea runs counter to the small is beautiful, less is more idea. First of all the idea of adding another section just to make things smoother, i won't even get into, the big thing is that the signal travels further to go from one pin of the tube to the other than it does through the rest of the whole amplifier. There seems to be more reasoning behind using tubes than there ever has been these days so it was not hard to keep the faith so this led to thinking along the lines of small tubes, like the old Nuvistors, Musical Fidelity used. And i remembered a smaller variety, in glass tubes around the size of the neons you find in your domestic lightswitch. So i went looking to see if i could find any info that would show me whether there was some validity, sonically to those. Well i didn't get that far, instead what i found blew my mind. There are some people who mannaged to build a working triode on the scale of a transistor in an IC. http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/11_6_99/fob2.htm
How badass is that.
Now of course there are shortcommings but the fact that it can be miniaturised so much tends to make me very optimistic. The fact that it is a triode is rather heartening too.
I seem to recall that those other small tubes were an experiment or a short lived production as well. But if i can find some I think i'm going to try em out.
question is, what with novelty ipod docks with kt88s or 12ax7s, and subminiature tubes in labs, what does the future hold and will it sound any good?
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Posted by Dominic on
01-17-2007
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here's an extract from some people involved in such research http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989ITED...36.2651O
The miniature glass ones i mentioned, are called sub-micro and some examples are shown here: http://www.oneillselectronicmuseum.com/page10f.html. Still got to find some info though.
The micrometer size ones use Field Emmiters, like transistors, rather than heated plates like the usual kind of tube. I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing from a sound perspective.
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Posted by Romy the Cat on
01-18-2007
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I’m very far from being able to express any more or less valuable opinion on the subject however, what I understand that they/you are taking about small signal-level devised. Whatever it worth, I feel that pure SS can care line-level tasks perfectly fine, if the SS is made sonically right. In my experience SS begin to sound “wrong” when it cares power. With vacuum tubes is opposite. At line-level they have “issuers” but when tube pumps more power then they more “friendly”. The Cat
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Posted by Dominic on
01-31-2007
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After all, you still can't beat a tube for radio transmission.
I haven't yet come across a single transistor that can do 35Kw
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