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improved in design? Hmmm. (long)

bfranchuk, hi. What has improved in design?

That's a great jumping off point. To help you we'd all better step back to see what trends influenced this idea of reproducing music in the home.
As many have rediscovered some of the earliest tubes allow getting closer to the music than anything else. I speak of the early triodes - 45 50 2A3 10 300A/B er al. I believe it was Robert Fulton (thanks lowmu) who said (paraphrasing) audio has been going downhill since 1930. At this time sound reproduction was at the cutting edge, where industrial labs had been trying to master the fine art of perfected tube manufacture - producing uniform tubes by type. What about repro of music in the home? The whole tube/sound thing at this time was driven by the explosive growth of radio. Radio captivated a nation and changed it. All this right after WWI. Electrical recording began about 1925. Playback though was mostly via Victor Talking Machine technology - all accoustic. This gradually changed over time but the Great Depression and WWII changed it. Post war saw the HiFi in the home boom and the magazines that helped it along. The availability of war surplus parts was also a big part of this. The LP came along about 1947 or so - the microgroove. Before that it was 78 RPM 10" lateral cut or nothing. There were superb 78 reproducers as in the Capeheart player/changers. These were not mass market. The invention of the Beam Tube (6L6) happened in the mid 30's but really flowered after WWII. Was the beam tube an improvement over the triode? It was if power was what you were after. The post war years saw the rise of the HiFi industry where equipment became available to make music in the home. In most cases these were wooden consoles, the electronics hidden. There were also the intrepid amateurs. Kits and DIY were big in the past war years. Magnetic recording also flourished. Think Ampex, Magnecord, the RCA RT-11 and so on. So, in all of this what about design? It has taken until fairly recently that there has been a movement to go back to earlier application of tubes and earlier tubes themselves to discover what we have forgotten or neglected. New parts for audio are spin off uses from manufacturers who are supplying the military/industrial complex. That's where the money is. Maybe the reason you keep going back to older tube (circuit) designs like amps with PP triodes (not triode tied Beam Tubes) and interstage coupling is because as you say they simply sound better. Once you hear this for yourself it becomes a revelation. The solid state revolution was not driven by better sound but by the desire of the phone company to save electricity. It was the Japanese who took the transistor and began manufacturing radios with it. The challenge for solid state was to get it to sound as good as vacuum tubes. In this regard today nothing has changed. Oh, yeah, now we have sliced & diced music (digital) and lossy data mp3. At least the CD doesn't use digital compression. No wonder the LP has been rediscovered as well as reel to reel tape (thanks Bottlehead). The notion that new equals improved is just a marketing ploy. We live with the illusion that what we have today is better than what we had yesterday. At least with Audio there is an increasing understanding that this may not be true. Happy Listening, ya'll.


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