One man’s quest to revive the great American vacuum tube
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BTW, the repeater used to be a person's job, mostly women, they would sit in a small both and a call from say New York would come in and it could not reach Chicago with just simple copper loop so their job was to listen to what the person in New York said and repeat it into the next loop and so on until it go to Chicago, the longest loop would be maybe 100 miles. Originally the booth was 2 feet wide, just wide enough for a woman to fit into. It was a repeater bay, with little side walls to isolate the sound somewhat between repeaters. This was before electronic amplifiers.
One day, along comes an efficiency expert from HQ who figures out they can add a couple more repeater bays into the line up if you just shrunk it down by an inch to 23 inches. Then later, when electronic amplifiers came along, tube type of course, it replaced the jobs of all these women who were repeaters. Put them out of work. Later came the Fetron. But that is why bays are 23 inches wide to this day. Sort of like the old lore about railroad widths being the same as roman carriages,this was the lore passed down to me from what were the old timers then. Guess that's me now :)
And thanks for making this old person from Bell Labs feel positively like a young noob. (was there in the late 90s).
Edit: Wayback machine has the Teledyne spec sheet too: https://web.archive.org/web/20160227184512/http://hrsasa.asn...
Hearing this I immediately assumed that this was where the name of the game "Telephone" comes from (called "Chinese Whispers" in Commonwealth countries), but alas the article at Wikipedia doesn't suggest this.
They were pulling tubes out of what, live telephone circuit amplifiers? And what are these 23" bays nowadays, racks for equipment in telephone exchanges?
They break. They get hot. They contain high voltages that can kill people. They're basically the definition of a nonlinear device. Yet for some reason, they're the best in their niche – if you want a tube amp that can work up to 112 kW, Eimac will sell you one [1]. Some of them come with wonderful descriptions like "The tube does not require a socket as it is designed to bolt directly to the chassis by means of the grid flange. Cathode and heater connections are made by bolting directly to the amplifier circuitry."
Solid state (GaN / IGBT) are getting there but there are still new machines with tubes in being produced today. Of course, they have to (literally) warm up and are very annoying to work with – and can kill you – but, hey, valves aren't totally dead yet…
I don't think this is right. Triodes and pentodes have very linear operating regions. More so than a lot of solid-state devices. We make modern circuits more linear by using lots of active devices with negative feedback.
I realise it doesn't matter that much when you've designed the amp, but in practice I have wondered about e.g. 275 µs delay times (at ~50 MHz) that may well be due to amplifier imperfect phase responses away from the frequency they were designed to work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TriodeECC83Characteristic...
It’s great to see someone spend time manufacturing things like this for such a niche hobby that’s driven by passion. I wish more companies specialized in these things. I find myself spending too much time weeding through junk on Amazon to support my niche hobbies.
[0] https://bottlehead.com/product/crack-1-1-otl-headphone-ampli...
My favorite was the "stepped attenuators" they used to sell, Rat Shack rotary switches and ten cent resistors.
Lot of projects/how-tos here: http://diyaudioprojects.com/Tubes/tubes.htm
Another DIY forum: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/forums/tubes-valves.5/
A "Darling" I built from scratch (I built over half a dozen in total): https://imgur.com/PBKOQMk
(Of all the tube amps I've built the Darling is still my favorite for the sound, simplicity. The tubes were cheap enough to find — used in the radios in WWII bombers, made obsolete by solid-state and military inventory was dumped on the market. Maybe 1-Watt in power though? You might be surprised how listenable that is through full-range drivers + powered sub.)
A Darling write-up that got me started https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~reese/Projects/DoubleDarlin...
Hammond Manufacturing makes a lot of applicable transformers for the mid-to-lower range of hifi and they're largely stock items.
See if you have local hamfests. Tons of tube stuff there.
Remember, it doesn't need to be an audio tube to pass audio! My most-used amplifier is built around a pair of 6T9 TV Compactron tubes (basically the IC of the tube world, multiple elements in a space saving package). The circuit came out of an old GE vacuum tube manual. As long as you don't tell the electrons (or audiophiles), they'll never know!
But considering they sell magic power cords ( https://bottlehead.com/product/bottlehead-power-cord-kit/ ) it's probably well into audiophoolery spectrum.
Assuming the basic Crack 1.1 is similar, at a price of $349, that's $165 / 90% markup for packaging up the kit for you, a nice case, and very detailed assembly instructions with lots of pictures and warnings about the dangerous parts and whatnot.
(And $96 of that $184 is for the Hammond 273AZ transformer, which I found a post saying is similar to Bottlehead's custom PT-3, but I'm not too sure about that, and I wasn't going to spend too much time figuring out the specs for the PT-3. Perhaps a better choice of transformer would significantly cut down that cost.)
You clearly know what you’re talking about, so I appreciate your input. Now that I’m more confident, my goal is to learn things at your level and understand how to assemble things more practically and at cheaper costs.
He's got to be one of the world's experts on nixie tube manufacturing, at this point.
https://www.daliborfarny.com/product/puri-nixie-clock/
For $1700, I might think about it first :/
They were somewhat cheaper back then though....
And one of the tubes is acting funny (slowly fading from the bottom), which I should probably do something about. But it seems like it's stabilized, so maybe I can keep on ignoring it!
If it becomes a hand me down to your kids, well that makes it even more special.
I have some stock that I'm going to sell soon, and one of the things I'm buying (besides a car) is one of his nixie clocks.
They'll be timeless decades from now.
Hopefully not.
nixie manufacture at a non-industrial level is pretty involved, so each tube has to pay for someone manufacturing it for several hours, and that's before you even get to material and research costs. I do wish these tubes were more affordable, but the price is unfortunately pretty understandable.
On the plus side, Dalibor himself has been extremely helpful in answering questions and resolving minor issues with the clock (both software issues, both quickly resolved).
It is undoubtedly a hard to justify luxury item, but if on the fence you should buy it. It is more impressive in person than I imagined.
https://www.timesticking.com/steve-wozniaks-nixie-watch/
(Googling it, I discovered Nixie tube watches are "a thing" and you can buy them)
The hand made ones are also instant heirlooms, particularly if their batteries are easily replaced.
And some parts in them should also be able to be fixed or replaced with a soldering iron and basic electronics diagnostics.
Even my 10 years old behringer junk still work, what are you buying that breaks so often than you'd consider paying 5x more vs just having a spare piece of gear ?
> (Good micro-controller based stuff is a different story, but amp emulators are not built like top of the line digital equipment.)
I mean if you buy the cheapest, sure
I once built one of these mini guitar amps based on an LM386, $5 of solid state components. When plugged in a real cab it sounds just great.
And spoiler alert; with a couple of flat solid-state volume boosting pedals, an EQ made on a breadboard, and cheapo amplifier he was able to basically recreate the tone of several famous amp sounds. Honestly it makes me reconsider what sort of setup I want and need personally.
I do think that tubes do give a particular overdriven characteristic that is difficult (though far from impossible) to achieve with solid-state components; I don't think it's impossible (or even difficult) to make a solid-state amp that is as good as a tube amp. Just happens that when you use SS components, it's almost always much cheaper; and it becomes harder to sell an expensive amp if your cheapest amp is almost as good. So I believe that the engineers at the big name guitar amp companies tend to give less effort and development to cheaper amps than their big siblings. Which has given SS amps a bad name.
I bought a busted JCM 800 combo for $20 when I was 18. I fixed it with a soldering iron, multimeter, a copy of the schematic from ampage.com, and Forrest Mims III electronics book from radioshack.
In response to other posts about repair, high quality tube guitar amps are actually extremely reliable if not abused, and some component replacement that is done prophylactically (e.g., re-tubing and re-capping) is often unnecessary.
Uh, yeah, no. Tube amps are terribly unreliable and most solid-state stuff will survive being dropped off the truck. There is a reason why touring musicians are tending to use modeling amps now. They can take their Neural/Kemper/Fractal box in their carry on on a flight and grab whatever standard speaker-amp is available at the destination and be ready to go.
And maybe a tube amp is nicer--if you get the "stage queen". Unfortunately, that's less than 10% (often less than 1%) of whatever amp model you have and costs a fortune if you are ever lucky enough to bump into one probably needs an expensive amount of service work to start. Whereas your modeler is a very good approximation and you will always get it when you buy one.
My point is - you buy a tube amp (or quality hardware solid state that is not a computer on a surface mount pcb that no one can repair) and you will have it for decades or sell it at close to what you paid. Not at all the case for Line 6 style stuff.
Maybe my ears are a bit less golden or whatever, but I barely break out any of my old tube amps since getting a Kemper years and years ago
The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less.
Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
The mistake with most solid state guitar amps is that they have similar wattages to tube amps. At stage volumes, it's easy for a measly 50 or 100W thing to go into clipping.
If you want solid-state guitar amplification, skip guitar amps and use a high wattage power amp used for sound reinforcement. E.g. something that puts out like 800W or more into a 4 Ohm load. This will have the headroom not to crap out when competing with the other guitarist's 100W head.
Not only that, but it will cost you less $$$ (particularly in the second hand market), and likely weigh less than your friend's 100W tube head.
Solid state guitar amps from guitar amp companies are snake oil, basically. They are not representative of what you can do with solid state.
Did you know Eddie Van Halen used solid state amps? One thing he did was to use a Marhsall tube amp head as a giant guitar pre-amp: capture the speaker output, reduced to line level, and re-amplify with a power amp, like a H&H V800.
But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on.
There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse.
I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work.
Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.
I'm not saying it's not nostalgia, it could very well be....
A naive view point is that the analog output of an analog device is going to be smooth.
The digital output will add noise on the stair step transitions.
I'm not saying this is the case in reality. I'm just saying, it's useful to think about when dealing with analog vs digital signals.
LOL, what? Tubes produce the distortion you hear in most branches of heavy metal, and iconic sounds throughout the whole spectrum of guitar rock.
In its raw form, it sounds awful; it has to be carefully shaped by filters, to remove high frequency "fizz" as well as annoying midrange frequencies to which the ear is sensitive. Even then, that filtered tone isn't something you could listen to via hi-fi equipment or record directly; it is amplified into certain kinds of cabinets with certain kinds of speakers. After all that, some people still hate it. :)
Side note - I have a hunch that the term “warm” was coined unconsciously. It’s not the actual sound; it’s the sound characteristic of warm glowing tubes, the sound of electricity fizzing through hot metal.
The equivalent all tube amp would require a line of credit from the bank, and would need to be on wheels.
To inject pleasing tube distortion into it, which I could turn on and off easily, I could put two inexpensive tube pedals in front of its inputs, like these:
https://www.amazon.com/TC-Electronic-Tube-Overdrive-Pilot/dp...
Not really, and it isn't just warmth. The distortion is a unique pattern of simple and monotonically decaying series of harmonics, dominated by moderate levels of second harmonic. This is probably why most find it pleasing.
Note that a solid-state amp can still be analog, transistors vs. tubes is distinct from analog vs. digital. Analog solid-state amps can make fantastic sounds, but transistors are much better at staying linear until they clip, so the transitions to nonlinearity/distortion are abrupt and the crunchy tone is less “warm”.
With tubes, I think would hold even if the tubes themselves became cheap as chips.
Time is another one: simply using the same piece of gear for years can imbue it with the power of ritual. Many writers use the same kind of paper and pen, and sit at the same sea, and the repetition alone is enough to summon the write mental state.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvAovXWLq8Q6VITKAB_Rjww
I found it pretty fascinating and watched them all in one night.
Wired wrote about him back in January.
I'm now of the strong opinion that there is NO need for tubes any more, unless you've got old gear you want to keep working, and are willing to fork over the money for the tubes, and the power they waste as heat.
It makes me sad, I've been learning how to repair old tube ham gear (Collins, et al) from a friend who's been doing it since he was a kid in the 1950s. I've learned to have strong contempt for silver mica capacitors, and a reverence for the silence of modern non-dynamotor power supplies.
The strangest case was the RF amplifier that didn't work... because the ground lug the grid was connected to, wasn't a good ground.
Yet some people still buy actual pianos. Because there's an art and craft and history to pianos, and they're majestic, slightly intimidating machines; and they're expensive status symbols. A tube amp for a guitar is much the same.
... what the power amplifier and speakers that you can afford then forbid.
You will simply not re-create the sound that a real piano creates in a room with a digital signal, going into some amp and pair of ordinary speakers.
I've made it a point to attend classical music concerts, and even I think that 0.1% might be pushing it when it comes to the piano sounds I've heard in a room.
I've got nice flat-response studio monitors so I could get a close enough room sound if I wanted (not that I could play a piano worth a damn in order to do that LOL). Honestly they weren't particularly expensive. Certainly less expensive than a single piano tuning!
All of that is condensed into a single voltage signal and sent to a speaker.
A speaker is also a 3D object; it has various modes of vibration. With multiple speakers in a cabinet (even with just a mono signal, not talking about stereo), and reflections from walls and so on, you can hear different things in the 3D space.
These are not related; the speaker cabinet just won't reproduce the experience of playing a piano, or being right next to one. It reproduces its own sonic 3D signature.
Now if you're listening to a piano from a distance in a big hall, some of this matters less. Your head movements don't make much of a difference; it's almost just coming from a single point that could be represented by a single point source (one mic capture), panned into a stereo sound stage.
However: 99.9% of all piano music heard is not heard through a live piano directly. Make that several more nines if you're talking about someone who doesn't even play piano and occasionally hears something in a huge audience hall. It's heard recorded, and then played through a speaker.
Then let's say I want to play. If I'm trying to match something I've heard, it doesn't even make sense to take that physical piano into account. What I heard was a recording. I lose nothing by playing it out of a speaker.
If I want to play just for the joy of playing a physical object or something, that's a different story. But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that, the speaker loses nothing. And best of all? It's light and cheap!
That's obviously false for the individual who is a life-long, dedicated pianist, who listens to the piano in front of him or her for hours, daily, more than any other piano.
They would be short-changed by some piano synthesizer patch coming out of a pair of speakers.
> But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that,
In particular: the purpose of creating a quality recorded sound without the hassle of an acoustic space, with excellent microphones, placed expertly, going into quality preamps, and all that.
Synthesized and modeled sound makes it easier to produce (or fake, depending on your viewpoint) quality recorded music.
Although to be fair, most of the time “liking the sound” is indeed just due to quirks of the analog implementations, like eq cramping. Those differences were emulated long ago, and producers often do reach for a “colored” emulation instead of the “ideal” digital filter.
(Ears hear only binaural phase effects. If the phase doesn't change when you turn your head, it is not relevant.)
About phasing issues, it is not usually the path-difference between your two ears, but harmonic interference due to mixing the phased signals, which cancels out desirable frequencies.
Although I do have another excellent Dan Worrall video for you, about the ears thing: https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8
Tube amps used in creating music usually have a distinctive sound. Fender Twin Reverb and Ampeg SVT are but two of the many tube amps with a distinctive sound. Solid state amps typically have a very different sound.
Yes, there are digital amp simulators and yes they are very good nowadays. But lots of musicians want the real thing.
That may not appeal to you, and you may dismiss it, but that’s the case. People generally aren’t buying an expensive tube guitar amp because they think they’re rare - tube amps are not hard to find. They’re buying them because they like the sound.
Tubes in hifi equipment is a whole other ballgame. No comment on that one.
You’re giving guitar players too much credit, they are only one step below “audiophiles” in their love for snake oil and marketing.
Tube amps persist mostly because guitar players instinctively turn their nose up at solid state, due to tubes having been the state of the art when the first generation of world famous electric guitarists was young.
Bass players are slightly better, mostly because an SVT head weighs 80 pounds and nobody wants to lug them around.
On the other hand, tube amps are a PIA and are prone to having those delicate tubes shake their innards apart if jostled the wrong way, not to mention their backbreaking heft. Therefore I use a solid state/modeler amp on stage, because of far better reliability, weight reduction, and versatility. Now there are even pedal amps, with class D power amps built in, so guitarists need only bring their pedalboard and maybe a cab. But when it comes to recording, most studios are still gonna prefer genuine, preferably vintage, tube amps.
Nobody really gives a shit about your tone on stage anyway.
The only reason that solid state is now catching up to tube nowadays is that:
* Front of house tech and home recording has made riding cranked amp tone live in a live environment a hassle, both technically and in terms of achieving the sounds that are being recorded
* Solid state can credibly emulate tube tone now (this has happened on things like tube compressors, too)
Having said all that, any time spent in the guitar pedal market (particularly around dirt boxes) will convince anyone that guitarists are indeed, as you say, total suckers for snake oil and marketing. :)
I agree with you, but I think solid state amps have only been "good" for the last 5-10 years at most, which is a pretty short time to change everyone's mind, habits, and equipment. So be gentle :)
Vinyl records are merch and you don't need any reason to buy one beyond wanting a keepsake with more interest than a poster.
I think there's something to be said about the overlap of Taylor Swift fans with audiophiles, too.
It's worth noting: The nonlinearities in the tube amps are very different from the solid-state amps. So the right thing to compare it to is one of the newer digital sims with an appropriate IR response, scanned over different input strengths to simulate the nonlinearities.
And I say this as someone with a 70s vintage Fender Twin Reverb: The emulators are really good.
But in general, since the transistors took over, they've been available for about $10 in current dollars, only a little more expensive than they were back in the 1960s. US manufacturing faded out in the 80s, but tubes were manufactured elsewhere commonly into the 90s. It's apparently still profitable to manufacture them for $10 or so, at least with legacy tube-making equipment.
The real expensive ones are like binned semiconductor parts. The best frequency response, least micro-vibrations, etc. Or manually selected pairs with similar properties. But if you just want to replace the pre-amp and don't care much they were like $12 just a couple years ago.
So I don't know what the collectors are doing, really. Not exactly a market you can corner so long as people keep burning out their tubes and multiple companies keep making them.
I expect that would improve tube sales, rather dramatically. Lower priced, high quality tubes, made without slave labor or something near it, and with actual quality control? That would be rather popular in many circles.
I'm aware it's an unpopular thing to point out on HN, but we are very much in the middle of a vinyl resurgence, with LPs having drastically outsold CDs in 2022, and showing no signs of slowing down. Make fun of it however you want, but there's very strong interest right now in analog, non-digital, non-consumer-tech, non-tracked-and-data-collection sound. Tubes go well with that, and quite a few high end audio vendors these days have various tube amps in addition to their semiconductor based amps.
It seems a good place to be, and I wish him the best of luck with it - I may have to see if I can acquire a set or two down the road when prices drop a bit.
But vinyl is selling radically more, year over year, every year since 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival#/media/File:US_v...
To finish the graph out, 2021 was 41.7M and 2022 is 43.5M.
You can write it off however you want, but to dismiss it as irrelevant is a good way to miss what's going on in the world.
ever notice how after a destructive tornado they say "it looks like a bomb went off", and after a bomb goes off they say "it's like a tornado blew through here". Not the same situation as the CDs, but the same in that my brain says "wait a minute..." and if you want to impress the listener, you don't want them thinking "now holup"
I appreciate your attempt to explain the phenomenon, but unpicking your words I don't find myself much wiser. CDs are not tracked or data-collected either. Vinyl players are every bit as much "consumer tech" as CD players. As for "analog" and "non-digital, they mean the same thing - but why should they be in demand? They sound worse. And before you say "it's not about the sound", sure, but even for intangible "souvenir" value, the only disadvantage a CD has over a vinyl record is that it's smaller. And surely it's at least a little bit about the sound? After all, they're not buying empty covers.
These things are highly labor intensive to make and producing tubes with a consistent level of quality requires extreme attention to parts tolerances and procedure. Do you buy tubes or are you just opining on something you have no experience with? I would kill to be able to get a pair of good 300Bs for 100$
It looks like they currently outsource, but their Twitter page is full of their manufacturing plant being set up.
Brimaruk.com https://twitter.com/BrimarBob?t=YDFMlMM2JeKHwmLTrmtOZQ&s=09
Man, I miss Bell Labs.
Most of the tubes that have become expensive are the ones that guitarists swear by. GEC KT66 and KT88 along with Mullard EL34 have surged in value as the supply has dried up. In the audio world the most expensive tubes are the 300B and especially the original 300A triodes. While Americans were in the process of throwing out and destroying the old Western Electric tubes, Japanese audiophiles started buying them up starting in the 80s. A tremendous number of the existing vintage WE tubes are now there and in China. The current version of the Western Electric 300b tubes have a very good reputation but there are other boutique manufacturers in Germany and Japan that also make highly regarded versions.
I own 400+ tubes. Like I said, I like them for their history and as amazing objects. I don’t own any really expensive ones but I have had fun finding alternative tubes for my equipment that are less expensive but have the same sonics as the more expensive ones. For example I can use tubes with heater voltages other than the common 6v. I have also done things like use a pentode tube converted to a triode. Lots of fun and it sounds amazing.
1. Couldn't be made at scale now due to regulations around the lead. 2. Seems like a lot of the knowledge is lost too.
I found a factory on alibaba who can manufacture Crts with new old stock tubes, but their minimum order quantity is 500 and who knows what the quality would be like.
Couldn't get them to do a "sample run" of 10 for me either
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=-ka9DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1367
Same reason we (Glitch Works) haven't done a new 8-bit ISA Ethernet board. They're still available for $5-20 basically any time you want one.
You might be able to get, say, a VGA monitor but need to hook up a composite-only console, and that means a hairball of adaptors and converters.
I could see some merit in a generic "chassis" kit-- it would have all the important inputs and geometry controls, but be buildable to drive a range of common picture tubes salvaged from old monitors and TVs. Might even be a chance to upcycle TVs and monitors where the original chassis was crappy and unreliable.
I learned that you can just buy nixie power supplies and adjust them to the strike voltage of the tube, which is a bit nicer than the custom circuit I linked. but be careful- you're either dealing with mains voltages or high DC voltage, both of which can be pretty painful if you make a mistake.
Home-made CRT is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESwj-VXjDtY
This is probably the best description of tube sound. Not that they don't distort, just that humans seem to like it when they do. If you A/B tube and solidstate amps at a level where neither is driven into distortion, they're hard to differentiate.
Fawk it's loud. But damn is it a beautiful sound.
The guitar guys are A/B testing their way toward modeling. I guess that leaves the Hi Fi guys. Nothing against fetishism or historical reenactment, but I'm not sure that's leaving much.
All the clean presets I use go through the solid-state signal path; no tubes.
That shows you where I stand.
Tubes are for the blatant distortion everyone can objectively hear. That effect is so undeniable that all the modern digital modeling equipment purposefully reproduces it, using specific amplifier names in the settings.
(Why can't that modeling shit come up with something original and leave the tubing to the tubes? Hundreds of millions of transistors switching in two voltage levels, to simulate an evacuated glass bottle with a couple of electrodes. That's like using Postgress DB to construct a thread mutex. Abstraction Inversion: http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html)
E.g. people dig the usability and reliability of Microsoft Windows, but other operating systems are still used at least for shits and giggles, right?
I've not heard of anyone using anything other than tube amp models. Either that, or going to a guitar synth with a MIDI pickup to make it into a clarinet.
There are plenty of VST waveshapers. Just...everybody wants to use them to reproduce tube amps and pedals instead of different distortion ideas. Hell, personally I can't even hear the difference between whatever different models of distortion people come up with anyway...