Roger Ebert Hates 3D

[RGA]

Not to change the subject , that is probably not true. The worst problems with tubes such as noise and distortion are still not resolved as they are inherit to tube protocal.

Actually that is not true. If it were then tube amps could not be used with headphones. I have had several headphone amps here including SS and the quietest one of the lot is the SET headphone amp from Antique Sound Labs. It is also the only headphone amp that has not suffered from picking up some sort of slight noise (RF I'm guessing). Moreover i have owned 5 solid state amps and all of them experienced a bad hum due to cable interference - the ASL and the OTO had no such noise. While I grant that a bryston 3b has a lower noise floor than my OTO and my Sugden SS was better with crosstalk the OTO is a SE Pentode and is far quieter than one would expect from a tube amp. Where tube amps can generate noise is the power amp section of certain designs and from certain makers so I would agree with you that a great many tube power amsp have higher noise (though not audible at the listening position or during playback). But then I am listening to quality tube amp makers - I can't speak for the non quality variants. Although I did audition a $299 Vuum tube amp and it was dead quiet???

It should be noted that SS has far higher distortion than SET. SS uses feedback to make the numbers look good but before the feedback actually engages the damage has been done. That is why in every case a good SET amp sounds far clearer, less grainy, whole, and isn't dynamically constipated. SET is to the best recordings, that SS is to highly loud highly compressed pop IME. I recently directly compared a bryston Preamp with some of their best power amps and what was fascinating was that the SET amp in direct comparison was clearer - more instruments, better transiant attack, layering, cymbal decay, the flow from note to note. The bryston gear sounded incredibly conjested, thin, and I had to keep turning UP the volume to make things out, up and up and then the speaker began to compress. I have done these session with bryston for over a decade. They are so patently bad at resolution it's almost absurd. Though they are noise free - I get the sense they're taking the music out along with the noise. Something I complained about with various and some degree "all' of Dolby noise reduction systems and various speaker damping systems. They may take out the noise but they take the baby with it. Indeed that's been my compalint with the vast majority of panels - they take out the box resonances which is probably true, but they also take out the bass, dynamics, and ability to generate the air pressure of actual instruments in the room. To me they gut the entire sense of live scale and believability in the narrow focus to get rid of a bit of box noise (which many boxed speakers get away from enough to not sound like a box).

The thing about arguments over tube distortion and noise - they neeed to actually be heard and the tube noise "should be cumulative" if it were actually true. I am sitting here with a tube cd player and tube amp - it is far less noisy than my other room which has a Marantz receiver and less sensitive speakers. And not long ago I had a tube preamp dac, tube hybrid monoblocks and again dead quiet.

The only tube amps I remember being somewhat noisy were from Jolida and the famed ST 70. But the latter was something like 40 years old so it has somwhat of an excuse.