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In the Forum: Audio For Dummies ™
In the Thread: Disregard Digital with Vacuum Tube output
Post Subject: The question wasn't addressed to me but...Posted by Antonio J. on: 12/9/2007
I think they're different things. I have a tubed phono preamp which I've slightly tweaked until it delivers the results I needed. If I had found a SS unit doing the same things for me, I had got it. It's not a matter of tubes being better or worse than SS. It's a matter of digital playback systems using tubes in the output, usually (I say "usually" because I haven't heard everything in the market) use the tubes to add color to the sound and to try to cover the digital nastiness. This kills other very important things in the music.
I understand Romy's comment as a warning, maybe there's some tubed CD player sounding right, but provided it's using a fashionable modern upsampling DAC, it will probably sound wrong. It will have some warmth and some other colorations which at first listen could seem more "natural" or whatever than a SS unit using similar chips, but it won't be something that really delivers an interesting result. The place to get right digital is not the output, is where the reading is made and the conversion is done. Maybe a correct digital reading and conversion can benefit of a tubed output, but I bet not in a higher degree than a SS one if both are conveniently "inexistent" soundwise.
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