Re: Building a Tube Amp

On a sunny day (Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:34:55 -0700) it happened Tim Wescott
<tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
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Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:04:12 -0700) it happened Tim Wescott
<tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<4POdnbMrieKWTGnVnZ2dnUVZ_j6dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

That argument could easily be applied to building violins out of
plastic, or just using sampled violin sounds in a synthesizer instead of
a string orchestra.


Maybe you have not noticed, but whole orchestras come out of the paper cone of your loudspeaker,
and the plastic membranes of your headphone.

If you would be so kind as to point me to a wholly synthesized rendition
of Beethoven's 5th that is entirely synthesized, and is generally
recognised as sounding better than an orchestral version generated by
real people?

You are confusing 2 things, first there is the input from the *player*,
then there is the sound of the *instrument*.
Naturally both are tightly coupled, but I am pretty sure (well assumption),
that if Stradivarius played some run of the mill made in Mechico violin,
he could still keep an audience in awe.




Yet somehow, when I go to the symphony it's all flesh-and-blood people
playing wooden instruments.

Probably amplified by ....

Circa 1985 you couldn't build a solid state 'distorter' that would
satisfactorily replicate the sound of a tube amp.

Ah come on!!!!

You have one that was built in 1985 and enjoyed any kind of acceptance
at all by serious musicians?

That is a straw man.
The issue is 'can we make a tube sound at low level'.
Well any diode clipper does that.
Now you can add other stuff, like 'sagging supply', quite easily, by doing a peak detection
and lowering the diode biases, etc etc.
Asymmetric? Can be done too, the 'Joerg way', couple of discretes,
some JFETS, what not.
There is no problem there.
The problem is in their idiotic specs, 'soft', colourful', 'sexy', 'fuzzier',
'warmth', 'alive', 'organic' hey, what does it mean?
Does it mean the same thing to person A as to person B?
So you first have to come up with some real tests, scope it,
see what is different, and recreate that with some hardware, software,
lookup tables if you must (AD EPROM DA for curve, now there is hardly latency),
etc.
Formulate the exact problem, and you have the solution.


And that would be difficult?
Hell the only limiting factor doing it all digitally was the introduced delay.
Today, with GHz FPGAs and very fast DSPs, I think there is hardly any problem
doing simple things like that.

Not so. Yes, the technology enables it, but that leaves the limiting
factor of our understanding of the mechanisms at work modifying the
sound, and the labor involved in replicating them in DSP.

Sure, right.


I think it can be done (I think it _has_ been done), but it'd be a hell
of a lot of work for a very talented team. If you think you can do it
on your own with a few lines of Verilog, then get cracking -- there's a
river of money to be had if you make it work cheaply.

No way, I do not like to sell snake oil, and I do not want to stimulate anybody
to believe in snake oil.
And I would have to advertise in their snake oil language to sell it.
Simple as that.


So if you're making a bazillion (and you think you can market it to
guitarists) then you can plan on amortizing all that engineering expense
over a bunch of units, and it makes sense. If you're building one --
get some tubes, buddy.

Personally I think very few real guitarist give a dime.
They can play, and use the instrument to express themselves.
A lot of others will just go for some sort of special sound, well it is not that
what makes music, Hendrix burned his guitar on stage IIRC, good thing too.

(am I gone hear about this LOL).


So yea, for reproduction the "vacuum tube sound" probably makes no
sense. But given that the distortion of the amplifier is an integral
part of rock & roll guitar, I think it'll be a while before vacuum tube
amps can really be replaced.

I like that article that Guy Macon pointed to:
http://www.trueaudio.com/at_eetjlm.htm

That whole tube stuff is marketing, just like oxygen free cables.
Some will prefer to ride horses as those feel so 'soft' versus driving
in a car I guess.

Yup. And my 2000 Ford Escort (and anything else with a motor) will
climb right past those horses going up that 45 degree slope with those
8" rocks cluttering the 18" wide trail.

Oh, did not know that.
To each his own ;-)

.

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