Sound Reproduction
Audiophiles may agree or disagree on the relative merits of tube vs solid state amplification. Some say they prefer the sound produced from tube amplifiers on the grounds that it is more natural and satisfying than the sound from transistor amplifiers. Otherwise this preference or difference is far too generalised or even vague without taking amplifier designs into consideration, and there are many. Certainly these audible differences are due to distortion types: harmonic, distribution, level and many other factors.
Those who subscribe to measurement and scientifically-based approaches to high fidelity note that in general, solid state designs can be manufactured without output transformers and are therefore immune to speaker-dependent impedance mismatches and other transformer effects which alter the system spectral response. On the other hand, ruler flat frequency response does not necessarily mean a good sounding amplifier. It should be noted that the loudspeaker itself (regardless of price) will likely produce more distortions (non-linearity and uneven frequency response) than any other part of the system. Typically, in sound reproduction systems, accurate reproduction of the sound of the original recording is the goal; distortion and uneven spectral response within the audible frequency band is something designers deliberately seek not to introduce.
Read more about this topic: Tube Sound
Famous quotes containing the words sound and/or reproduction:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)