Her er en motvekt mot nostalgien som hersker på dette forum fra Peter Aczel:
The Vacuum-TubeLie
This lie is also, in a sense, about a peripheral matter, since vacuum tubes are hardly mainstream in the age of silicon.
Its an all-pervasive lie, however, in the high-end audio market; just count the tube-equipment ads as a percentage of total ad pages in the typical high-end magazine. Unbelievable!
And so is, of course, the claim that vacuum
tubes are inherently superior to transistors in audio applicationsdont you believe it.
Tubes are great for high-powered RF transmitters and microwave ovens but not, at the turn of the century, for amplifiers, preamps, or (good grief!) digital components like CD and DVD players.
Whats wrong with tubes?
Nothing, really. Theres nothing wrong with gold teeth, either, even for upper incisors (that Mideastern grin); its just that modern dentistry offers more attractive options. Whatever vacuum tubes can do in a piece of audio equipment, solid-state devices can do better, at lower cost, with greater reliability.
Even the worlds best-designed tube amplifier will have higher distortion than an equally well-designed transistor amplifier and will almost certainly need more servicing (tube replacements, rebiasing, etc.) during its lifetime. (Idiotic designs such as 8-watt single-ended triode amplifiers are of course exempt, by default, from such comparisons since they have no solid-state counterpart.)
As for the tube sound, there are two possibilities: (1) Its a figment of the deluded audiophiles imagination, or (2) its a deliberate coloration introduced by the manufacturer to appeal to corrupted tastes, in which case a solid-state design could easily mimic the sound if the designer were perverse enough to want it that way.
Yes, there exist very special situations where a sophisticated designer of hi-fi electronics might consider using a tube (e.g., the RF stage of an FM tuner), but those rare and narrowly qualified exceptions cannot redeem the common, garden-variety lies of the tube marketers, who want you to buy into an obsolete technology.
The Antidigital Lie
You have heard this one often, in one form or another. To wit: Digital sound is vastly inferior to analog. Digitized audio is a like a crude newspaper photograph made up of dots.
The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem is all wet. The 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the compact disc cannot resolve the highest audio frequencies where there are only two or three sampling points.
Digital sound, even in the best cases, is hard and edgy. And so on and so forthall of it, without exception, ignorant drivel or deliberate misrepresentation.
Once again, the lie has little bearing on the mainstream, where the digital technology has gained complete acceptance; but in the byways and tributaries of the audio world, in unregenerate high-end audio salons and the listening rooms of various tweako mandarins, it remains the party line.
The most ludicrous manifestation of the antidigital fallacy is the preference for the obsolete LP over the CD. Not the analog master tape over the digital master tape, which remains a semirespectable controversy, but the clicks, crackles and pops of the vinyl over the digital data pits background silence, which is a perverse rejection of reality.
Here are the scientific facts any second-year E.E. student can verify for you: Digital audio is bulletproof in a way analog audio never was and never can be. The 0s and 1s are inherently incapable of being distorted in the signal path, unlike an analog waveform.
Even a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, the lowest used in todays high-fidelity applications, more than adequately resolves all audio frequencies.
It will not cause any loss of information in the audio rangenot an iota, not a scintilla.
The how can two sampling points resolve 20 kHz? argumentis an untutored misinterpretation of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.
(Doubters are advised to take an elementary course in digital systems.)
The reason why certain analog recordings sound better than certaindigital recordings is that the engineers did a better job with microphone placement, levels, balance, and equalization, or that the recording venue was acoustically superior. Some early digital recordings were indeed hard and edgy, not because they were digital but because the engineers were still thinking analog, compensating for anticipated losses that did not exist.
Todays best digital recordings are the best recordings ever made. To be fair, it must be admitted that a state-of the-art analog recording and a state-of-the-art digital recording, at this stage of their respective technologies, will probably be of comparable quality. Even so, the number of Tree-Worshiping Analog
Druids is rapidly dwindling in the professional recording worl
........,men det er vel igjen smak og behag.
