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Looper's Delight
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I'm so tired of seeing this "warmer" expression trotted out lazily every time someone is trying to market something with a bottle in it. what exactly is it supposed to mean? is it to do with noise-floor, frequency response, distortion, what? those of us that have had the lids off some of this kit will know that, traditionally anyway, the glass gets warmer than it's silicon equivalent. but that is irrelevant to the end-user. I've seen quite a few examples of equipment fitted with an ecc83/12AU7/whatever, where the heater wasn't glowing bright enough for the box's designers & so they fitted a yellow/orange LED underneath it to fake the glow. a lot of these modern valve devices run with very low HT, either for regulatory reasons (e.g. the EH stompboxes) or because the makers just couldn't be bothered with the nuisance of having to generate 400V DC accurately & reliably. sure, the valves last longer, but they are working so far down their conductance curve that they're not doing any real work (& so the output needs buffering/boosting with a 5532 or the like) & of course, they're operating miles away from the only musically useful part of their character..... which is- here's the only major sonic difference that matters in 99% of normal everyday contexts: if, & only if, it's driven into non-linearity (& by this time we're in fuzz-box territory, not super-clean mic pre-amplifier), the valve/tube tends to produce slightly more by way of even harmonic distortion, while the silicon or germanium tends to produce odd-order harmonic distortion. I say again, these are distortion products, & are not supposed to be there anyway. some feel that the even harmonics are more musically useful; this certainly seems to be the case in the context of (typically overdriven) instrument amplification. there are other (sometimes very involved) arguments for & against the continued use of thermionic valves in "high-end" audio equipment- mic pres, compressors & the like. class-A operation is slightly more stable, perhaps. phase distortion....... well. all I can suggest is that a blind listening test be performed before the emperor leaves the tailor's shop. I play my bass through an orange OR120 because I like the way it sounds when I turn it up loud. but I record it straight into a korg digital multitrack with an sm57. your mileage, as always, will vary. oh- & an all-tube circuit is more likely to carry on working when exposed to a massive electromagnetic pulse, such as caused by a nuclear explosion. this may or may not be a selling point. :-) duncan.