Valve preamp active speakers
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Microphone Preamps
Tube sound or valve sound is the characteristic sound associated with a vacuum tube amplifier valve amplifier in British English , a vacuum tube -based audio amplifier.
After introduction of solid state amplifiers, tube sound appeared as the logical complement of transistor sound, which had some negative connotations due to crossover distortion in early transistor amplifiers. Thus the tube sound now means 'euphonic distortion. Many electric guitar , electric bass , and keyboard players in several genres also prefer the sound of tube instrument amplifiers or preamplifiers. Tube amplifiers are also preferred by some listeners for stereo systems.
Before the commercial introduction of transistors in the s, electronic amplifiers used vacuum tubes known in the United Kingdom as "valves". By the s, solid state transistorized amplification had become more common because of its smaller size, lighter weight, lower heat production, and improved reliability.
Tube amplifiers have retained a loyal following amongst some audiophiles and musicians. Some tube designs command very high prices, and tube amplifiers have been going through a revival since Chinese and Russian markets have opened to global trade—tube production never went out of vogue in these countries.
Some musicians [7] prefer the distortion characteristics of tubes over transistors for electric guitar, bass, and other instrument amplifiers. In this case, generating deliberate and in the case of electric guitars often considerable audible distortion or overdrive is usually the goal.
The term can also be used to describe the sound created by specially-designed transistor amplifiers or digital modeling devices that try to closely emulate the characteristics of the tube sound. The tube sound is often subjectively described as having a "warmth" and "richness", but the source of this is by no means agreed on. Possible explanations mention non-linear clipping, or the higher levels of second-order harmonic distortion in single-ended designs, resulting from the tube interacting with the inductance of the output transformer.
Beyond circuit design, there are other differences, such as the differing electronic characteristics of triode , tetrode , and pentode vacuum tubes, along with their solid-state counterparts such as bipolar transistor , FET , MOSFET , IGBT , etc.
In many cases circuit topologies need to account for these differences to either homogenize their widely varying characteristics or to establish a certain operating point required by the device. The low frequency roll-off can be explained by many tube amplifiers having high output impedance compared to transistor designs.
The roll-off is due to higher device impedance and reduced feedback margins more feedback results in lower output impedance. How much feedback is optimal for tube amplifiers remains a matter of debate. A psychoacoustic analysis tells us that high-order harmonics are more offensive than low. For this reason, distortion measurements should weight audible high-order harmonics more than low. The importance of high-order harmonics suggests that distortion should be regarded in terms of the complete series or of the composite wave-form that this series represents.
It has been shown that weighting the harmonics by the square of the order correlates well with subjective listening tests. Weighting the distortion wave-form proportionally to the square of the frequency gives a measure of the reciprocal of the radius of curvature of the wave-form, and is therefore related to the sharpness of any corners on it. A huge issue is that measurements of objective nature for example, those indicating magnitude of scientifically quantifiable variables such as current, voltage, power, THD, dB, and so on fail to address subjective preferences.
Especially in case of designing or reviewing instrument amplifiers this is a considerable issue because design goals of such differ widely from design goals of likes of HiFi amplifiers. HiFi design largely concentrates on improving performance of objectively measurable variables. Instrument amplifier design largely concentrates on subjective issues, such as "pleasantness" of certain type of tone. Fine examples are cases of distortion or frequency response: HiFi design tries to minimize distortion and focuses on eliminating "offensive" harmonics.
It also aims for ideally flat response. Musical instrument amplifier design deliberately introduces distortion and great non-linearities in frequency response. Former "offensiveness" of certain types of harmonics becomes a highly subjective topic, along with preferences towards certain types of frequency responses whether flat or un-flat. Push—pull amplifiers use two nominally identical gain devices in tandem.
One consequence of this is that all even-order harmonic products cancel, allowing only odd-order distortion. Power amplifiers are of the push-pull type to avoid the inefficiency of Class A amplifiers. A single-ended amplifier will generally produce even as well as odd harmonics. Push—pull tube amplifiers can be run in class A rarely , AB, or B.
Also, a class-B amplifier may have crossover distortion that will be typically high order and thus sonically very undesirable indeed. The distortion content of class-A circuits SE or PP typically monotonically reduces as the signal level is reduced, asymptotic to zero during quiet passages of music. Class-A amplifiers measure best at low power. Class-AB and B amplifiers measure best just below max rated power. Loudspeakers present a reactive load to an amplifier capacitance , inductance and resistance.
This impedance may vary in value with signal frequency and amplitude. This variable loading affects the amplifier's performance both because the amplifier has nonzero output impedance it cannot keep its output voltage perfectly constant when the speaker load varies and because the phase of the speaker load can change the stability margin of the amplifier.
The influence of the speaker impedance is different between tube amplifiers and transistor amplifiers. The reason is that tube amplifiers normally use output transformers, and cannot use much negative feedback due to phase problems in transformer circuits.
Notable exceptions are various "OTL" output-transformerless tube amplifiers, pioneered by Julius Futterman in the s, or somewhat rarer tube amplifiers that replace the impedance matching transformer with additional often, though not necessarily, transistorized circuitry in order to eliminate parasitics and musically unrelated magnetic distortions.
This circuitry increases the amplifier's output impedance, resulting in response similar to that of tube amplifiers. An amplifier with little or no negative feedback will always perform poorly when faced with a speaker where little attention was paid to the impedance curve. There has been considerable debate over the characteristics of tubes versus bipolar junction transistors.
Later forms of the tube, the tetrode and pentode , have quite different characteristics that are in some ways similar to the bipolar transistor. But there are exceptions, for example designs such as the Zen series by Nelson Pass. Loudspeakers usually load audio amplifiers. In audio history, nearly all loudspeakers have been electrodynamic loudspeakers.
There exists also a minority of electrostatic loudspeakers and some other more exotic loudspeakers. Electrodynamic loudspeakers transform electric current to force and force to acceleration of the diaphragm which causes sound pressure. Due to the principle of an electrodynamic speaker, most loudspeaker drivers ought to be driven by an electric current signal. The current signal drives the electrodynamic speaker more accurately, causing less distortion than a voltage signal.
In an ideal current or transconductance amplifier the output impedance approaches infinity. Practically all commercial audio amplifiers are voltage amplifiers.
Due to the nature of vacuum tubes and audio transformers, the output impedance of an average tube amplifier is usually considerably higher than the modern audio amplifiers produced completely without vacuum tubes or audio transformers.
Most tube amplifiers with their higher output impedance are less ideal voltage amplifiers than the solid state voltage amplifiers with their smaller output impedance. Soft clipping is a very important aspect of tube sound especially for guitar amplifiers.
A hi-fi amplifier should not normally ever be driven into clipping. The harmonics added to the signal are of lower energy with soft clipping than hard clipping. However, soft clipping is not exclusive to tubes. It can be simulated in transistor circuits below the point that real hard clipping would occur. See "Intentional distortion" section. Large amounts of global negative feedback are not available in tube circuits, due to phase shift in the output transformer, and lack of sufficient gain without large numbers of tubes.
With lower feedback, distortion is higher and predominantly of low order. The onset of clipping is also gradual. Large amounts of feedback, allowed by transformerless circuits with many active devices, leads to numerically lower distortion but with more high harmonics, and harder transition to clipping. As input increases, the feedback uses the extra gain to ensure that the output follows it accurately until the amplifier has no more gain to give and the output saturates.
However, phase shift is largely an issue only with global feedback loops. Design architectures with local feedback can be used to compensate the lack of global negative feedback magnitude. Design "selectivism" is again a trend to observe: designers of sound producing devices may find the lack of feedback and resulting higher distortion beneficial, designers of sound reproducing devices with low distortion have often employed local feedback loops. Soft clipping is also not a product of lack of feedback alone: Tubes have different characteristic curves.
Factors such as bias affect the load line and clipping characteristics. Fixed and cathode-biased amplifiers behave and clip differently under overdrive. The type of phase inverter circuitry can also affect greatly on softness or lack of it of clipping: long-tailed pair circuit, for example, has softer transition to clipping than a cathodyne. The coupling of the phase inverter and power tubes is also important, since certain types of coupling arrangements e.
In the recording industry and especially with microphone amplifiers it has been shown that amplifiers are often overloaded by signal transients. Russell O.
Mastering engineer R. Steven Mintz wrote a rebuttal to Hamm's paper, saying that the circuit design was of paramount importance, more than tubes vs. Hamm's paper was also countered by Dwight O.
Monteith Jr and Richard R. Flowers in their article "Transistors Sound Better Than Tubes", which presented transistor mic preamplifier design that actually reacted to transient overloading similarly as the limited selection of tube preamplifiers tested by Hamm. A particular 'sound' may be incurred or avoided at the designer's pleasure no matter what active devices he uses.
In other words, soft clipping is not exclusive to vacuum tubes or even an inherent property of them. In practice the clipping characteristics are largely dictated by the entire circuitry and as so they can range from very soft to very hard, depending on circuitry. Same applies to both vacuum tube and solid-state -based circuitry. For example, solid-state circuitry such as operational transconductance amplifiers operated open loop, or MOSFET cascades of CMOS inverters, are frequently used in commercial applications to generate softer clipping than what is provided by generic triode gain stages.
In fact, the generic triode gain stages can be observed to clip rather "hard" if their output is scrutinized with an oscilloscope. Early tube amplifiers often had limited response bandwidth , in part due to the characteristics of the inexpensive passive components then available. In power amplifiers most limitations come from the output transformer; low frequencies are limited by primary inductance and high frequencies by leakage inductance and capacitance. Another limitation is in the combination of high output impedance, decoupling capacitor and grid resistor, which acts as a high-pass filter.
If interconnections are made from long cables for example guitar to amp input , a high source impedance with high cable capacitance will act as a low-pass filter.
Modern premium components make it easy to produce amplifiers that are essentially flat over the audio band, with less than 3 dB attenuation at 6 Hz and 70 kHz, well outside the audible range.
10 Best Powered Speakers for Turntables 2021/2022
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Douk Audio Mini Bluetooth 5.0 Vacuum Tube Preamp HiFi USB Player Stereo Audio Headphone Amp
Post by Jeremey » 27 Dec Post by y3 » 27 Dec Post by pivot » 27 Dec Post by analogaudio » 27 Dec Quick links. Username: Password: Remember me? Please login or register an account. Board index Hardware Amplifiers and Loudspeakers.
Tube sound
Would this be a bad idea? Given there are three modes passive, differential and tube would this be a good option if I wanted to say, use powered monitor speakers for music listening, I can switch to tube mode and get less flat sounding image. Would this threaten the studio monitors I doubt this, but just asking to be safe before I make a decision? I was thinking of ways to save desk space for my computer set up and rather than getting a power amp to passive speakers to share desk space with the monitors and switching between them I can just use the studio monitors with the preamp. Yup, should have no problems.
MASHALL JMP1 VALVE MIDI PREAMP - USED
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Tube Preamp for powered speakers
So can you connect an Amp to Active Speakers? Always remember passive speakers require a power amp and active speakers do not. You are about to read everything you need to know to do it the right way. Are you ready to sound huge? Active speakers or powered speakers are loudspeakers with amplifiers built-in. This means that each active speaker can reproduce sound without the need for any kind of external power amp. Some people call them a 2-in-1 solution because they offer power and audio in the same package.
Valve preamp to active speakers
After adding this preamplifier, unpleasant digital sound of audio sources will be filtered out. Music will be softer stronger and more beautiful. With DAC function 3. Inside USB sound card for better sound effect for computer 6.
Robot or human?
Please note this is a preamplifier, which needs to be connected with amplifiers or active speakers. The newest tube preamp of Nobsound with upgraded function and design. Hundreds of reviews and thousands of customers witness the excellent sound performance and quality of our NSE. This new product will satisfy you again. Excellent sound performance far more than what you paid for; No background noise; Adding tube sound and eliminating digital style for your sound system; Providing warm and soft sound output; Enhancing sound field and sound quality remarkably; Suitable for various music types.
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