There is still a cadre of audiophiles who belive that tube amplifiers produce “warmer” sound than solid state amplifiers.
I have seen a number of these amplifiers-most use Russian made tubes-hence my question:if the Russians are still making tubes, what are they going in to? Do they still make tube radios, TVs, etc.?
Or is it a case of having a huge inventory of these things? As far as I know, RCA (USA) was making tubes as late as 1980-these were for old military equipement-nothing in the civilian sector was sing tubes after 1970 or so.
Never mind the Russians, the Americans are still making tubes. It’s not the same Western Electric that my grandfather and father worked for, but Western Electric is still making tubes to this day in Kansas City.
In Soviet Russia, TubeYou!
It is not just audiophiles with the tubes. It is a bit cheaper and more robust to build high power ham radio amplifiers using tubes than with transistors. A single tube will typically handle the full legal limit, where this requires multiple transistors, and it is far more difficult to combine the power from these. The high impedance of the tubes does require tuned matching networks, but these serve to suppress harmonics, so the filters needed by solid state amps are avoided. Solid state power amplifiers do typically require less user expertise to operate.
They’re still also commonly used in higher-end guitar amplifiers. Not only do guitar geeks prefer the “warmer” sound, but the distortion which is a hallmark of the rock guitar sound seems to be best achievable by overloading a tube-based amp.
tube amplifiers clip (“overdrive”) rather differently than transistor amplifiers, so yeah, this makes perfect sense.
I’ve heard that some of the older tubes are actually much easier to find these days than they were back in the 70’s and 80’s because factories in Russia and China that had been making tubes for the military have been retooled to make tubes for vintage Western audio equipment. Of course, the same sorts of hardcore audiophile types who prefer tube equipment also often look down on the new foreign tubes and prefer the New-Old-Stock ones.
On a trivia note, according to the Computer History Museum, apparently some older USAF radar computer systemsin the 1980s had to rely on vacuum tubes imported from the eastern bloc. :smack:
RF amplifiers using tubes are also more tolerant of impedance mismatch at the antenna.