tube amp for your USB port

I'll comment after awhile.
I don't want to color anyone's judgment...

 

You can color mine, I have no idea what I'm looking at, except it looks like a modern car on wooden wheels.

 

???
hmmmm....

Well, it looks nice.

Not sure I get the point, though.

Anyway, since they took out the tube tester down at Walgreen I probably won't buy one.

 

Computer audiophiles-isn't that an oxymoron.

 

I don't get it either. With sound, the output is only as good as the input. No matter how great the amp is, it cannot make the output sound great if the input is of poor quality. Computer sound, by definition, is digital, it is only a sampling and approximation of the original analog sound. So even with a tube amp, which is great for analog sound reproduction, the poor quality of the input (the digital sound) determines the quality of the output.

 

I wouldn't call it a tube amp for your USB port. I'd call it a tube amp with integrated DAC. It just happens to use the USB standard rather than SPDIF standard to receive the digital information. From what I gather, lots of people have digital sources (ie, CD players and such) connected to their tube amps.

 

Computers are coming into increasing use as home media centers -- my new one has a Blu-Ray player (and recorder) and HDMI in/out capabilities as well, for example, plus enough disk space to store lots of movies and CDs.

Thus, the input question isn't such an issue as it's been, and having a good output (amps/speakers) system is a good idea.

But this thing is only 4.5W/channel. That's pretty useless, as far as I'm concerned. HPH

 

I was wondering about that as well - but with a little searching it seems not out of the ordinary for a tube amp to have less than 10 watts per channel. Which makes sense in a way - I can crank my amp up to way, way, way louder than I'm comfortable listening to, and it's only 85W. It spends most of its time with the volume knob turned up only 10 to 20%.

 

Power requirements also depend, of course, on speaker efficiency. And, if I recall correctly, tube amps do better with transients (in the sense of not clipping so easily), so less overall power is probably OK. Still, 4.5W, well, gee... HPH

 

It has to do with the way that tube amps clip.
solid state amps when over driven generate square wave type distortion with substantial amounts of odd order harmonics which sound awful and destroy tweeters. This means you need substantially higher amounts fo headroom to accommodate peaks without clipping.
Tube amps tend not to do this.


but I just thought the entire thing was a little silly to be playing your mp3 files and at the same time trying to talk about the natural musicality of the device.
Of course I haven't tracked the golden ear crowd for a while but the single driver speaker with no crossover seemed a little silly too.