Comment Re:Tubes vs. transistors (Score 1) 567
There is an analog filter on the output of the D/A converter.
Sorry to interrupt your (and everyone else's) tirade but I think that he's talking about the clipping characteristics of transistors in a guitar ampifier. Sure, they don't put out a "square wave" but they do color the sound somewhat harshly becuase they clip the signal harder than a tube would. I think the "square wave" that this guy is talking about is that heavily and harshly clipped signal that a solid state amplifier produces.
IEEE Spectrum has article about this very subject right here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/select/0898/tube.htm
You (and other people who've posted) should lay off this guy, he may be a poor writer and theoretically ignorant but he didn't deserve to be ripped apart like this. Sound is certainly a "REAL, quantifiable data" but how we percieve sound can't be quantified. What sounds good to one person might sound horribly to the next. Asking someone to quantify how they percieve a sound would be like asking them to explain what love is, it simply cannot be quantified no matter how much slashdot types would like it to be.
By the way, I think tubes in home audio equipment sound like complete shit, although I do love that hiss on old Zeppelin albums (I think it adds character), I'd much rather my music be reproduced in digital form because I know its true. With that said, I don't like solid state electronics in my guitar amplifiers. It's not anything I can't deal with, seeing as how I can't afford the 1600 dollars to get the tube amplifier that I really want, but there is a noticeble difference in the characteristics of the two types of amp. For examples, listen to Pantera's 'Cowboys from Hell' album and Metallica's 'Black' album. Both utilize heavily distorted guitar sounds and were recorded about the same time (1990), but Pantera used solid state guitar amps and Metallica was using tube amps.
Going back to the subject of psychoacoustics, if you don't have any expierence with guitars and guitar amplifiers you might not percieve any difference at all between those two albums, even though there is a difference, and 90% of guitar players could easily hear it. (Yes, I'd gladly participate in a double blind test)
P.S. I know there is a rampant need for slashdotters to show their intellectual superiority over others, with that said: I know that I can't spell, when we were copying words 100s of times in elementary school so we could learn how to spell I was busy devising ways to get out of it. I'm suffering now because of that and I'm fully aware of it, you don't need to let me know.
