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Romy the Cat wrote:

Last night I was listening  Zubin Mehta’s recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No.9. It was his first recoding from 1966 with Vienna. I am not a big fun of this performance all together but it has spectacular first movement. It played superbly slow and superbly soft. Wiener Philharmoniker showed off so fantastics colors that it almost like looking into a sonic kaleidoscope. I played this movement a lot and I feel my record surface is not good anymore but still the first movement sound good. The way how London recorded the play is a bit bass shy and the orchestra does not have that Bruckner’s crash, still not a lot of people have balls to play Bruckner’s 9 so gloriously lush… So, why I was listening my playback it mentally noted some predictably of its Sound. It is not that I did not see it before but lately it becomes a bit more forward presentable. What happened lately was elimination a reference to ground and running my playback in the way how I use to run it in my old room – with floating ground after the PP2000. This did add some upper MF clarity and made my MF a bit too much.   Too much of what?  This is a complicated question.  Surely it is not about amplitude – running DSET I can moderate MF as much as I want. It is not about color. The YO186 has wonderful colors and it might not be such a thing and too many colors if tube is chromatically neutral. What YO186 has is a very special and in a way unique throaty character that makes most of the recording to sound better than they are. It might be called a very minor touch of hoarseness or even roughness but very delicate and very sophisticated. Still, with some recording this characteristic become a bit more recognizable then I would like it be. I think this characteristic might be moderated by driving the tube harder.  It is 12W tube and I drive it at near 8W. However, in my MF- DSET direct-coupled application and with 410V max I have no ways to drive the plate at 10-12W. So, for now I pulled my YO186 out and put in type 45 tube.  I think they sound better than any other expensive 2.5V and 4V tubes I have. To change tube in MF Milq is very simple and thanks God I did two tube socket with 2.5V for 2A3/45 and alike and 4V for PX4/RE604 and alike.  I will play the type 45 for a while, while I test the YO186 – perhaps it just died… I like the type 45 as it is super clean. I kind of miss the YO186’s very fine feeling of texture but I might find some ways to get it. It is for sure another flavor of sound and strings become less “complex” but less “problematic” at the same time. The type 45 has for sure less or no own colorations of any kind I will let it play for a while and let see where it will lend me.

I have in music many reference points that I call “Transcendent Moments”. They are not the moment of beauty but rather combinations of beauty and misery of such caliber that you wonder how humans were able to create it – God must be at his day off when they did it. For years, besides chasing Sounds and writing about it at this stupid forum I have another reference in my playback – how high magnitude of my reference “Transcendent Moments” my playback can throw.  The better playback I have the more magic, mysterious, mystifying and the more fantasy stimulating my “Transcendent Moments” are. So, the type 45 tube at my MF, although it doe wonderfully sound it at the same time it also greatly reduces the bewildering effect of my Transcendent Moments. The YO186 was uncontested kink from that perspective.

For instance the very opening phrase in Adagio from Dvorak 8th Symphony is one of my Transcendent Moments. The same phrase use by Tchaikovsky in his 1812 overture, eight years before Dvorak but Tchaikovsky went to nowhere with it. Dvorak did with it something magnificent, bringing the phrase to the realm of unresolved childhood fantasy. Being properly played this, a few second-long fragment, is absolutely sufficient to me to tell about playback more than I need to know. The type 45 tube just convert my entering to Adagio into nothing special, absolutely diluting all “unexplained” magic from the music. Bad, bad, bad tube…. :-(

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