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How Tube Amplifiers Work

robrobinette.com

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#51
post #6

I had a 1971 Marshall tube amp land in my lap, for free. I'm not a guitar player, but wanted to get it fixed it up before either selling it or learning guitar. There's a lot of "magic" there - the amp guy asked if I wanted to swap the tubes for some "more authentic" tubes that were used in England at the time. Pro tip - don't ask the internet for advice for making your tube amp sound nice, you'll get every opinion po…

Guitar amps are all about getting the right kind of harmonic distortion, so of course the guy had opinions. But tube rolling is madness, avoid it at all costs.

In this case it was a very common swap, 6550->EL34 for Marshall JMP 50W. I ended up going for it (the existing tubes were damaged), it sounds great.

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found fascinating the power section of valve amp for guitar will always be made of a very basic rectifier circuit to convert AC to DC that requires a expensive transformer and produce power with a terrible efficiency compared to more modern SMPS. Why is it nobody interested in valve amp never go the SMPS path? Is it all because sag is a desirable sound distortion?

I noticed the same thing. Like, why not at least use a fullwave rectifier with semiconductor diodes? Surely nobody believes that a tube diode in the power supply makes any audible difference.

Tube amp people will believe anything that helps them justify their product ownership.

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#54
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the same thing. Like, why not at least use a fullwave rectifier with semiconductor diodes? Surely nobody believes that a tube diode in the power supply makes any audible difference.

Tube amp people will believe anything that helps them justify their product ownership.

Let me rewrite that without the condescending tone: Artists that output sound invest time and money into crafting how they are heard. Is there tube amp elitism? Absolutely. Do tube amps "sound better"? I dunno. But clearly the market for them and the demand for inefficient circuits that sound different than more efficient circuits stays seemingly consistent and may even go up.

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#55

I was a tube amp tech for several years, have built multiple guitar amps from scratch, and still dabble in it. What may not be obvious is that modern tube amp designs are an evolutionary branch from 1930's technology, with only a little coming across from the transistor->digital tech tree. The amps of the 40s and 50s were pretty closely based on reference designs that came from RCA and other tube manufacturers. Moder…

I always found fascinating the power section of valve amp for guitar will always be made of a very basic rectifier circuit to convert AC to DC that requires a expensive transformer and produce power with a terrible efficiency compared to more modern SMPS. Why is it nobody interested in valve amp never go the SMPS path? Is it all because sag is a desirable sound distortion?

The rectifier is an audible part of the circuit, you can definitely tell e.g. between tube rectifiers and diode based ones.

SMPS have been somewhat problematic with audio circuits when they were new, especially when it comes to noise and "musicality". A overdimensioned toroid transformer with a rectifier is inefficient, but an extremely simple design which allows people without too much electrical engineering knowledge to get a decent result without expensive measurement equipment.

This is a bit similar to early PCB-use in guitar amplifiers. Back then some manufacturers did a shit job with their PCBs and since then guitarists think hand-wired is always superior to PCBs.

Guitarists are traditionalists and thus the amount of innovation in that space moves slower than elsewhere.

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he solid state transistor amplifier was invented, and they had no idea how it worked either. That cannot possibly be true. Not knowing what exactly is going on with the charge carriers at the subatomic and quantum levels is not the same as not knowing how the amplifier works: like if we fiddle with the voltage at the base, we can influence the collector current, and all the rest. What is true is that some early tra…

Radio Shack sold PA amplifiers with an output transformer well past the age of the tube, like the MPA series, e.g. MPA-40, a 20 W mplifier. On that thing you can obtain the raw amplifier output using the "70V" terminal. Then it has a number of through-the-trafo outputs labelled with nominal ohmages of speakers. The Owner's manual extols the advantages of using transformers for speakers and describes how to use the 70…

Eh? 70v PA is really common stuff and has been for a very long time. You probably hear it every time you're in a department store, amusement park, stadium, or other public space.

There's no need to LOL. It's useful tech.

By using a (~nominal maximum) 70v intermediate voltage, low-impedance PA systems become high-impedance. Compared to low-impedance systems at any power level, current through the wire feeding that system is reduced. Increasing impedance reduces the size of the copper wire required, and makes things easier for practical amplifiers to drive.

This is Really Useful in systems that may have dozens or hundreds of speakers distributed over a wide area.

Just to pick an example: Let's say we have 24 8-Ohm speakers to drive in a place like a grocery store. The system never needs to get proper-loud, so we'll budget 1 Watt for each speaker (24 Watts total).

If they're wired in parallel[1], then that's an impedance of 0.33 Ohms. Most power amplifiers can't drive that kind of impedance. It's also 8.5A of current, which isn't too daunting but is significant.

But if we add transformers and run things at 70v? Things get a lot easier.

Let's say we pick a 50 Watt amplifier just so we get some headroom instead of maybe running it at 100%, and that this amplifier's output power is rated at 8 Ohms.

That amplifier produces a maximum output of about 20v. Suppose we step that up to ~70V with a 1:4 transformer (which actually gives us a maximum of 80V, but again: headroom), and drive our grocery store full of 24 1-Watt 70v speakers with it.

With the same 24 Watts, our current on the speaker line drops from 8.5A to ~0.34A -- it goes from significant, to very nearly unimportant.

Our amplifier is happy: Rather than 0.33 Ohms, it sees an impedance of 12.75 Ohms.

That's an amplifier that runs cool and quiet, probably for decades. The wire can be small (18AWG seems common-enough in the grocery store overhead PA systems I've worked on; much smaller than that, and things become harder to deal with inside of ceilings). The speakers, which are all simply wired in parallel, can be replaced, removed, or added -- and also be individually adjusted in output level by changing transformer taps -- as time moves on without thinking much about the greater system architecture.

That's a lot of words, but in practice: 70v is easy. It works. We use this technique all over the globe: Some countries use 100v, and both 140v and 25v also exist as standards, but using transformers in PA-world is ridiculously common.

The usual method doesn't involve much thought at all: Add up the total power of the 70v speakers in Watts, pick an appropriate 70v amp that can drive at least that number of Watts, and send it. It's dead-simple to get right.

70v is not common in stage or musical instrument use, or in home hifi, but it doesn't have to be. It solves problems that don't exist in those spaces.

(And yeah, our grocery store needs a ~25:1 transformer on each 8 Ohm speaker. That's fine. 70v speakers that are intended to mount overhead and that include transformers with multiple secondary taps are very, very common and are still made every day in places like Chicago and Dayton[2] -- and again, you hear them all the time when you're out in public.)

[1]: We could use series-parallel arrangements to get around this, but those wiring configurations turn both arduous and easy to screw up, and loudspeakers have non-linear impedances so mixing-and-matching them in series as time moves on becomes problematic. Series-parallel isn't broadly practical.

[2]: Chicago: https://quamspeakers.com/product-group/ceiling-loudspeakers Dayton: https://fourjay.com/background-speakers/

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#59

I was a tube amp tech for several years, have built multiple guitar amps from scratch, and still dabble in it. What may not be obvious is that modern tube amp designs are an evolutionary branch from 1930's technology, with only a little coming across from the transistor->digital tech tree. The amps of the 40s and 50s were pretty closely based on reference designs that came from RCA and other tube manufacturers. Moder…

I always found fascinating the power section of valve amp for guitar will always be made of a very basic rectifier circuit to convert AC to DC that requires a expensive transformer and produce power with a terrible efficiency compared to more modern SMPS. Why is it nobody interested in valve amp never go the SMPS path? Is it all because sag is a desirable sound distortion?

SMPS do output high-frequency noise, and the PSRR of tube amps is very bad.

Re: How Tube Amplifiers Work

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tube amp people will believe anything that helps them justify their product ownership.

Let me rewrite that without the condescending tone: Artists that output sound invest time and money into crafting how they are heard. Is there tube amp elitism? Absolutely. Do tube amps "sound better"? I dunno. But clearly the market for them and the demand for inefficient circuits that sound different than more efficient circuits stays seemingly consistent and may even go up.

There is a little more than that.

A guitarist who plays electrified isn't just playing the guitar; the entire signal chain becomes the instrument. Everything from the room to the fingers of the player alter the sound and how a person plays their instrument and for some even the temperature of the room makes a concrete, quantifiable difference.

Music appreciation is largely cultural as well. The history of music is full of people hearing sounds, becoming accustomed to them and reproducing them with a novel variation. This is exemplified by many recent genres like hip hop, rap, jazz, rock, folk music and so on. There were and are entire genres of music and specific artists that revolve around certain tools. For example the Sunn brand of amplifier, especially the Model T which is venerated by some subgenres of metal or Jimmy Hendrix and his Fuzz Face pedal (and his wah and octaver and amp, and .....)

Naturally, musicians seek to pay homage to and recreate the atmosphere and feel of a specific song, instrument, artist, genre or time period. Until fairly recently, modeling and digital tools had a lot of trouble replicating the sound and interaction of these vintage, analog circuits and even today the most straightforward way to achieve a specific style is often to simply buy or clone the old-school original instruments and equipment.

While digital modelling has come a long way, arguably surpassing most of the original equipment, the rarity, variation and uniqueness leads players to continually seek out the Real Deal in order to achieve an authentic style or sound.

An example of this entire idea is the DRUMETRICS collective, whose entire purpose is to write and record new and modern performances with original vintage instruments and recording equipment. Heres a link to one: "Pale Horse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZqoFf859Xw

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