>At 04:37 PM 9/7/98 -0700, you wrote:
>>>>>Touche' again! I remember how the race between transistors and vacuum
>>>tubes, in the 1960s, was complicated by the fact that the tubes started
>>>getting better. But at that point tubes were pushing fundamental technical
>>>limits and transistors weren't. With film vs. digital photography it's the
>>>other way around -- we know the limits of our digital materials better than
>>>those of film.>>
>>>
>>>Tubes have made quite a comeback. They are used in extremely expensive
>>>high-end audio gear, and also in recording studios in mikes, pre-amps, etc.
>>>
>>>One day film may also be the last bastion of the cogneseti <g>
>>>
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>
>>>Denton Taylor
>>
>>
>>Gee, Denton, I hope not in the same way --a technically inferior antique
>>medium sold for exorbitant amounts of money. It is like waxing nostalgic
>>for mechanical calculators. There is also something ironic in someone
>>claiming superior knowlege and then mispelling 'cognoscenti'.
>>
>>Sorry, Denton. Could not resist a little fun at your expense. ;-)
>>
>
>Maybe the joke's on you. And maybe you can't tell the difference btw a typo
>and a spelling error. Would you mind showing me where in the above post I
>made any claims to superior knowledge? If you refuse to acknowledge that,
>for example, the world's finest recordings are still made through Neumann
>tube microphones, maybe you need to do some further research.
>
>The joke's on you--and me. We also are using a technically inferior ancient
>camera. Why don't you get an F5 and put your OM1 in a display case along
>with that calculator?
>
>
>
>Regards,
>
>
>Denton Taylor
Random House Dictionary of the English Language: "cognoscenti - persons who
have superior knowledge and understanding of a particular field..." I
thought you included yourself in that. Sorry, did not mean to offend.
Actually to say that an OM1 or OM4T is technically inferior is, I think, to
confuse 'featuritis' with image making. And from what I have seen from your
excellent photos you know the difference. In general I don't think an F5
will produce a better image that an Oly largely because most photo
equipment research budgets in the past few years have been spent on
autofocus and matrix metering. Since Oly built the OM system I don't think
there have been any fundamental breakthroughs in designing and building
lenses which allows a significant image improvement.
It does seem to me that designing and building equipment to create images
or to reproduce sound is largely one of engineering. Unfortunately, there
are so many charlatans in audio, including some of the publications, that
they have created a market that Neumann is only too happy to exploit. And,
my goodness, a microphone. Besides being a really esoteric use of a vacuum
tube the microphone has to be the most subjective component in the whole
audio chain even more than speakers. People will kill to have a certain
microphone and the sound is so variable from model to model and brand to
brand that they all sound hugely different.
The big use of tubes is in power amplification which no one has ever
demonstrated with any kind science or engineering to have signficant
advantages over modern solid state designs. In fact just the opposite.
There have been demonstrations of introducing non linear frequency response
into solid state designs which will enable them to sound like tube
amplifiers. Thus distorted the solid state amp will have a null output with
the tube amp in a phase shifted sum and difference demonstration.
There are also large disadvantages to tubes such as cost, power
consumption, and the need to retweak things such as the bias circuits when
tubes have to be replaced. There is the added disadvantage as tubes age
that they go non-linear in their response long before they fail, which you
may not notice. Since most amplifiers have multiple output tubes in push
pull arrangements the contribution of one or two failing tubes to the
gradually degrading output is more insidious. So you are faced with,
besides spending several thousand dollars, the prospect of retubing the
amp on a scheduled maintenance with a tech person who will rebalance
everything for the hugely variable characteristics of tubes for several
hundred dollars. If you wait, because of economics to retube only when you
can hear a degradation in the sound, you will have been listening to music
for maybe six months with a higher amplifier distortion level than would
ever be emitted from the cheapest Japanese mass market solid state stereo
receiver.
Sorry to run on. I guess we were talking about film and ccd's.
Winsor
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California
mailto:wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx
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