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RE: Wavelength Crimson

What do you consider theoretical? I have a tube amp that I designed and built that runs at 25 watts per channel with zero feedback that runs at .03% distortion at 1watt and gets up to about .08% at 25 watts. Those are real measured numbers not theoretical. Try doing that with solid state devices without feedback.

The tube preamp I'm using has less than .01% distortion at full output, again actual measured results, not theoretical. Its probably less than .01% but its getting hard to measure down there, and I'm not really interested in spending the effort to improve the test setup to tell if its really .005 or .008.

The best zero feedback solid state preamp I can come up with is about .04%, which is still pretty decent, but not as good as the tube design.

I agree its true that most tube designs used today are fairly high distortion but tubes don't HAVE to be used that way. Careful selection of tube and operating point CAN result in very low distortion designs.

There is an article out on the net somewhere (it might take a while to hunt it down), where someone actually built a preamp circuit with something like 30 different tubes and optimized each for the lowest possible distortion and did the same for various solid state designs, again all zero feedback designs. Many of the tube designes handily beat the best SS designs. Some tubes were not that great, but others really were very good.

John S.

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