What mobo has the vaccum tube sound on it???

[THE V_I_R_U_S]

I saw somewhere that the price was about $235 YIKES!!!!

[MegalosSkylaki]

I recently bought a Chaintech Excel 6 channel Sound card with a Toslink FiberOptics input/output SPDIF bracket for $9, including shipping and fiber-optic cable.

Errr..what does a replacement tube cost ?

DOOOOOOOOG

[THE V_I_R_U_S]

or can you even buy replacements?????

[OuTpaTienT]

Tubes create a lot of heat! I have a Music Man guitar amp with a 130w all tube head. After using that thing for a couple hours the temperature in the room in noticeably warmer than the rest of the house. Not to mention I've burned myself on those friggin' tubes a number of times.

I still don't understand why they are using a tube in the sound electronics. It's not only silly, but it's an undesirable thing to do. You don't want tubes in your stereo hardware. Not if it's supposed to reproduce sound data as accurately as it can to the original source.

Tubes are great things for items such as guitar amplifiers. But it's a myth that they are also great for stereo system amplifiers. Why?

Because tubes color sound. They change it. That's why they are great for guitar amps. They add to the sound of the instrument. They can give a guitar strum a warm fuzzy "brown sound" or if overdriven past their saturation point they can give it a really gnarly fuzzy grungy sounding distortion.

But with stereo equipment (and this would apply to a computer sound card as well) you DON'T want anything in the electronic path of the sound that's going to possibly alter the signal. What you want is clean high quality solid-state components that can faithfully process and output a signal that is as close as possible to the original signal that the artist put into the recording.

Any knowledgeable electrician/engineer/true-audiophile will tell you what a joke tube amps are. Assuming the goal of your equipment is to reproduce sound accurately. So why are there still ultra-high-end & ultra-expensive tube amplifiers for stereo equipment? The biggest reason is…suckers. The "wannabe"-audiophile snobs that think they know more than anyone else about hi-fi just because they have a "killer" system (that usually cost them more than their car did). These "suckers" are easy to spot because they will say things like 'the modern stereo technology just sounds too cold and harsh', and 'CDs or other digit formats sound lifeless or thin'. Those are fallacies. Modern equipment, even all digital hardware, is far superior to tube technology. Today's equipment reproduces recordings extremely accurately. If a passage sounds cold and harsh or lifeless and thin, well then that's the artist's fault.

The problem these wannabe-audiophiles have is not that modern sound equipment is "harsh or lifeless"…their problem is they have spent their whole life listening to sound through tubes, which have always "rounded the edges" of the audio it reproduced and gave the listener "warm fuzzies" (pun intended).

[OuTpaTienT]

huh. Did I shut everyone up? Or is it just that no one wants to read all my dribble?

[MegalosSkylaki]

No, huh, sounds really clear to me. Get the pcture real clear.

But back to the Mobo, I think it probably is a hi=priced gimmick to call attention to the Mobo--with "snob appeal" (Maybey ) and "prestige pricing. Often done to "rub-off" on the rest of the line.

But like anything else, the proof is in the tasting.

So in reality anything we say about this Mobo is hypothetical. Of course I have my suspicions

And keep it up, OuTpaTienT as most people noticed that when they played their "33's" on superior system, it just made the scratches more evident.

And like anything else, if somebody has the bucks, it's their ears

And I can see somebody wanting to soften the "hard edges".

Doubt that this Mobo will do it.

Hey, what's wrong with hooking up my SNR>100 Fiber optics $9 Sound Card to an Audio receiver with Toslink fiber optic input--no power surge-- and six speakers. Or a $32 Blaster 5.1 OEM ?

Most of the time it's the speakers that mess up the sound, anyhow.

ACOUSTICDOOOOOG

[Tomteriffic]

One tiny thing, and this really isn't the place for the tube vs. solid state argument that has raged since Bell Labs invented the transistor.... but..

Operating within their deisgn parameters, tubes and SS "ought" to sound the same. They don't, obviously. But a cranked Marshall or whatever is intentionally being operated "outside" it's design parameters and being forced into obvious distortion.

As a VERY general rule, though, tubes have lower slew rates and are less able to reproduce extremely fast transients accurately. Transistors do it better. The REAL difference, though, is when either device reproduces a transient while still within it's design parameters and thus gets right out to the edge of its linear operating area for a fraction of a millisecond. If the transistor hits the edge of it's envelope, the minute distortion products that are produced from sneaking over the edge, just for a fraction of a second, are interpreted by the ear as being generally unpleasant. On the other hand, when a tube does this, it's distortion byproducts are heard as being more musical.

Taken to an extreme, this is why there's nothing like a Marshall on 11. In the case of my studio, the slower transient response of the tube power amp takes a small bit of the 'edge' off of some studio monitor speakers that have a wickedly fast attack in the top end and are intentionally built to have that hot top end so the engineer and producer can hear way down deep into the recording.

It's a nice trade-off. I can be in here all day (which doesn't happen nearly enough) and still be saying 'Damn, that sounds good" at the end of the day, and still be creating mixes that travel well into the "real world".

OTOH, putting an inexpensive 12AX7 (10-12 bucks retail everywhere, about $3 wholesale) circuit into a motherboard and tacking a hundred bucks or so onto the price tag, is just plain opportunistic and playing to the audiophile wannabe's.