Barry, this is a very nice new thread you have started! I had prepared the second version of my text during the last hour and just wanted to start a new thread regarding tube hifi, inspired by your welcome introduction.Here it is as I would have posted it when it was a new thread:)
Our newcomer Barry inspired me to start this thread, because he said that tubes are one of his beautiful hobbies. I wanted to make a start to discuss audio tubes. Initially I am not interested in brands or special circuits or differences in the quality of tube manufacturers. It's meant in principle. The other topic can come later if you like.
I have written a text about the whole history of my tube amps, speakers and so on since I was 15 years old. It didn't stop...At the end I had written half a novel and thought...who wants to read all this. That's why I erased everything.
So here is a second attempt and everything else can be posted later, bit by bit. When it comes to the peculiarity of tubes, I would like to start with a childhood memory. We had a mono table radio in the kitchen. I literally crawled into that radio. I listened to music and school radio, preferably radio plays about all kinds of things, polar expeditions, world conquest by sailing ships etc. I was between 5 and 8 years old. Then this radio was replaced by a more modern one. I cried tears when it was taken away. The new more modern radio, we are talking about 1967, was a transistor radio, my old favourite radio was a tube radio. The transistor device was more modern, flatter and...tinny dead in sound in my ears, but I couldn't have said it that way yet. I didn't know all this then, but I felt it! Fortunately my grandmother got the old tube radio so that I could continue listening to it in her apartment. My father - very fortunately - bought a stereo in 1972. It was all great and new. A Sansui QR 6500 receiver with Sansui SP 2500 speakers with tweeter horns and lens. Even pseudo quadrophony with rear speakers, a TG 1000 Braun tape recorder and a Dual 1219 turntable. On the one hand it was all very impressive and new and modern and expensive. But honestly: It was not the sound of the old kitchen radio with its tubes and without! Crossovers. With its half-open cabinet to the rear and its cardboard speaker. (All things that would later play a role again).
I would like to say that the most important and most valuable thing about my father's stereo system was that I was introduced to jazz and classical music very early on through his records, although of course I loved listening to rock and rock jazz. From Deep Purple to Pink Floyd to Billy Cobham.
So much for the intro, why I became a tube enthusiast. Everything else later in posts, but this was important to me to tell. I realized technically much later what I liked so emotionally about this old radio in my childhood. It was the intimacy and the undisturbed warmth of the sound that had such a wonderful clarity at the same time. And you know how childhood experiences can be branded I do not wish to present objective proof
that tubes are better. Perhaps it is only my imprinting that became my leitmotif.
