Tube Amp From Sac Thailand Reviewed

[Julian2]

Prehistoric?

 

That's an amazing bit of kit isn't it?

I'm convinced they were originally conceived by an alien stranded on this planet, I just can't think of a human brain working out that if you made these little glass tubes, put wires in them, pumped the air out, ran a current through them they would......

wtf DO they do any way?

[Mekong]

Keep looking, especially here. Amazing what you can find in some of Bangkok's back streets. Swear I've seen an AC30 in a junk shop here before now.

 

Cheers

 

Agreed, I have seen a couple here in the past few months but resisted the temptation so far, I need to keep my personal possessions to a minimum until I get the divorce finalised and decide where I am eventually going to live, I have enough shit to move around with me as it is.

 

Kong

[radioman]

One like this wouldn't be to hard to move around.

 

[kamui]

Slightly off topic:

 

A young girl see a record for the first time:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibfx4AFlgH4

 

[gobbledonk]

At least she had a CD as a frame of reference, albeit a digital medium vs the analog LP. Another 10-15 years and CDs/DVDs will only exist in the same shops that sell LPs to the diehards. The computer industry seems hellbent on digital delivery for everything, including HD movies - here in Oz, thats just laughable given our woeful infrastructure and high internet charges outside the major centres.

 

I dont miss the LP - they were bulky and scratched easily. I also had the fun experience of buying a brand new album, loaning it to my brother and getting it back like a badly thrown pizza - he left it on the back seat of his car and the sun melted it. Didnt talk to the little shit for a month.

[gobbledonk]

There are two schools of thought.

 

One is that the amp should be absolutely transparent: it should provide gain, but no distortion, where distortion is ANYTHING that causes the output signal to be anything other than a perfect reproduction, except for power level, of the input signal. Reviews from this school tend to talk about noise levels, THD (true harmonic distortion), nonlinearity, bandwidth, need for equalization, output impedance matching, and other things that can be measured objectively

 

The other is that the amp should "sound good". This school holds that distortion is perfectly OK, provided the distortion sounds "good", whatever that is. Reviews from this crew tend to be full of subjective language that is never defined, intended to be meaningful only to marketing droids, people with golden calibrated ears, just like the author, and people with WAY more dollars than sense.

 

Tubes have one alleged advantage over bipolar transistors: tubes distort gently, while transistors clip hard. Push a tube a little too hard, and it distorts a little, push it harder and it distorts a little more. Push a transistor too hard, and it clips hard, immediately. This advantage went away with the advent of field-effect transistors: they distort just like tubes do (and you can buy "Tube Grinder" guitar stomp boxes that are nothing but deliberately overdriven FET-input amplifiers).

 

If it seems fairly obvious which school I come from, well, there's a reason for that...

 

I'm all for independent measurements and objectivity, and I agree re subjective reviews, but as soon as you start listening to music with new kit the human brain takes over. New toy joy, purchase justification, the law of diminishing returns - I'm hip to all of that, but I still like looking at the shiny new toys. It beats stamp collecting by a significant margin.