Among obscure pop culture tidbits and stories about wacky inventions, Tedium has often documented the continued survival of technology long thought of as obsolete. From calculagraphs to COBOL, we love hearing that ancient tech survives in the 21st century and revel in the uses that keep them around. So it was surprising to dig through the Tedium archives looking for something I expected to find, but didn’t. Today, we’re righting that wrong and diving into the robust and thriving world of a technology that was foundational to the progress humanity made during the 20th century. Today’s Tedium is talking vacuum tubes.
Article has been posted for about an hour now…nothing but a VACUUM RESPONSE.
Its like the air was sucked out of the article or something.
I suspect the author was counting on the fact that supposedly we don’t live in a VACUUM and should pay attention to the evolution of tech.
I would go on, really I would. But it is almost 5PM and I have to leave work.
Uses, not sues. Didn’t really see much in the article about suing.
No I think he was talking about women named Sue. They really love their tube amps.
I thought it was a boy named Sue?
It may be in the ensuing article.
People forget that one of the largest vacuum tubes ever made was in everyone’s homes up until the mid 2000’s. the CRT. It’s a tube with a vacuum in it. Even the neck has tube-style connectors on it.
Microwaves also have vacuum tumes, in the Magnetron, and vacuum tube technology is still used to this day for switching and rectifying high voltage power in substations and power plants
Edited 2018-11-15 07:57 UTC
He didn’t mention the reason valves (vacuum tubes) are better for amps. AFAIK it is their inherent linearity and maybe their gain (multiplication effect on the input). You therefore need need less stages and no negative feedback (like “You are a very naughty tube! “) to get distortion free output. Seriously, negative feedback compares the input to the output and sends the difference as a counter (negative) correction to the input. The problem is there is a delay so the correction is applied to a slightly later version of the input signal and you get distortion, sometimes in the form of harmonics (higher frequency signals that you can’t hear but that suck energy) or mini oscillations (like echoes). There is a saying in the transistor world that “Every amplifier is an oscillator until proven innocent!”.
The other advantage of tubes is that they double as space heaters, though transistors are catching up on that one ;-} I have a cheap (1K) Chinese Amp that has not blown yet. Conveniently it has a USB port that I use to run a fan over the valves. Affectionados say the sound is crisper when running hot, but I would be more worried about burning my house to a crisp.
Not a very interesting article and the one bit that was (nanoscale valves) wasn’t covered well. As per
They do sound better in guitar amps and sometimes mic preamps.
They seem to thicken the sound, perhaps inject a very subtle, nice distortion to things. Every tube type sounds different. They also sound different depending on how hard you drive them.
When you get a good one (meaning you like what it’s doing to that source) for guitar or voice, you keep it. You cherish it. Nothing digital really comes close to the kind of texture you can hear through a nice tube.
I’m partial to the old british tubes and the old american ones. I can live with the new designs from Czech republic but they aren’t quite as fine as the old originals. At least they are still making them.
“thicken” describes viscosity, “texture” – graphics or surface, not the things you convinced yourself of (but yes, it’s all about the admittedly nice distortion…)
please don’t tell me what i hear or how i choose to describe it. that’s the problem i’m describing in my post… too many people trying to quantify, classify, and correct what someone else experiences. don’t convince yourself you understand exactly how you or anyone else hears.
i’ve mixed music for over 25 years. i indeed hear thickness and texture. i also hear many other descriptive adjectives in sound and use those abilities while mixing and playing music.
some of those things can be described mathematically, like for instance putting a 20ms delay on the snare at 450 Hz and 2db air at 4.5khz. but most of what i do and hear can’t be described mathematically. there are no accepted standards or methods for reproduction that we all agree on.
Thank you for that reply. You wrote “thicken”, I understood what you meant (I play guitar). “Warmth”, “creaminess” would have done fine too. “Nice distortion” as Zima says, is not quite a good enough description anyway.
You’re making my point for me, you used few quite different names for supposedly the same thing.
Ha, that’s the thing, first and foremost there’s only pretend-agreement among audiophools how to understand the “feely” terms…
(funny that the irony of you telling others how to use them escapes you)
And BTW, since you mixed music for so long there’s very likely some non-negligible hearing damage …how does that make you feel, hm?
Is there any technology beside CRTs that can display a variety of resolutions without scaling?
Laser-TV would have been an equivalent technology – even without the need of a vacuum. But it still need the space like all projections…
But blue laser-diodes came to late for that technology and LCD made it obsolete later.
Early “mechanical” TVs from the 1920s are also a very fascinating technology (they work like laser-printers with a beam of light instead of a laser of course…)
Also the “Eidophor” is resolution independent using electrostatic charges on a thin oil film….