alt Hacker NewsThere's really not benefits to vacuum tubes pretty much anywhere. The only place I can think of where they are superior (which may not be true anymore) is high power transmission in, for example, radio and radar towers.
In all other applications transistors will be superior. Especially because any problem from a transistor can be fixed by adding more transistors until the problem is gone or imperceptible.
The audiophile purists are using pseudo-intelectualism to justify a superiority complex. They frequently fail double blind tests whenever push comes to shove. The most famous example of this was them being incapable of telling the difference between a coat-hanger and a premium cable.
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The LHC particle accelerator uses klystron tubes for RF amplification: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1559978/contributions/6664488/a...
Photomultiplier tubes have a solid state counterpart [1] but there's still a lot of use for the vacuum tube version.
Eh. As far as instrument amps go, it's not about perfect fidelity. It's about color and distortion. You'd never say "perfectly white lights are the best for your living room." No one actually wants a perfect white light, people want some more yellow in there because it looks better. The goal isn't equal spectrum coverage or whatever. People like the non-linearity of tubes and that's ok.
The benefit is that they are incredibly simple to build.
I disagree. There is nothing in the digitally sampled and modelled world comparable to plugging your guitar into a hot over-driven tube amp and showing the feedback who's the boss. Pure analog transistors don't give that luscious even harmonic distortion and usually just clip like a meth-addled dog stylist in a poodle-grooming station.
> There's really not benefits to vacuum tubes pretty much anywhere. The only place I can think of where they are superior (which may not be true anymore) is high power transmission in, for example, radio and radar towers.
Tubes are still fairly common in 62 dBm HF ham amplifiers, but solid-state amplifiers are available now, so it's only a matter of time there.
> In all other applications transistors will be superior. Especially because any problem from a transistor can be fixed by adding more transistors until the problem is gone or imperceptible.
This is often, but not always, true. E.g. parallel MOSFETs operating in triode mode are subject to thermal-runaway.
> The audiophile purists are using pseudo-intelectualism to justify a superiority complex. They frequently fail double blind tests whenever push comes to shove. The most famous example of this was them being incapable of telling the difference between a coat-hanger and a premium cable.
Tube amps often will be audibly different in a double-blind because many of them have high harmonic distortion (as compared to a transistor amp). Most people think this is a Bad Thing, but audiophiles call it a "warm sound."