Yep, a tube is much faster than solid state and there's more. When you see an F16 high above you, you don't realize, but there's tubes in that plaine, because only tubes can handle the ultra high freq's of radar.
Here's a part of an article of Walter Sear:
----------------------------------------------------
Tube technology is over 100 years old. Thomas Edison, in an attempt to extend the life of the filaments in his light bulb introduced a positively charged 'plate' into the light bulb. While it did not extend the life of the filament, he did note that when AC current was applied to the tube, it was
rectified to DC, the first diode electronic tube.
Much has happened since. Tube technology continues to be developed and improved. Both the American and especially the Russian military
establishments have continued to develop tube technology since, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, tube equipment would remain unaffected by high levels of radiation.
After the invention of the transistor, transistorized audio equipment began to appear almost immediately. The early transistorized equipment sounded
awful but just as RCA advertisements around the First World War featured Enrico Caruso posed with a mechanical phonograph saying "I couldn't tell it from my own voice," people were sold on the idea that if it was solid state,
'state of the art,' it had to be better than the old tube equipment. They forgot one of the most important tests for new equipment - to listen to it
and to A-B it with known equipment. Much has happened to solid state equipment since then, but for quite a number of technical reasons,
transistors never equaled the musically acceptable sound of the vacuum tube. We at Sear Sound did some research into this and published our results in the Audio Engineering Society Journal in May of 1973.
Among other things, we found that in recording, instantaneous peaks arriving at the pre-amp of the console were as much as 39 dB above the overload point of the pre-amp. Tubes distorted by generating mostly 2nd harmonics (the octave) and even harmonics in general. Transistors produced odd and spurious harmonics often unrelated to the fundamental pitch. Tubes are voltage
amplifiers. They go into distortion on a gradual exponential curve. Transistors, when overloaded, saturate and simply clip when overdriven, producing these odd and unrelated harmonics which are certainly more unpleasant to the ear. Ask any organ builder.
Along comes digital recording. Again, we are told that we have finally achieved perfection in the recording art, just as we were told that the
transistor and the RCA 'hill and dale' mechanical records were perfection. In combination, the transistor and digital recording have gotten so far away
from a satisfying musical sound, that some 'fix' was sought. The vacuum tube rides again, to the rescue.
No matter what is done to digitize a musical signal, over sampling, bit mapping and all of the other 'fixes,' sooner or later we are stuck with a
44.1kHz sampling rate. Good engineering practice has stated that the minimum sampling rate to get a near emulation of a signal is to sample at 5 times the highest frequency. If we assume that the highest frequency is 20 kHz., then we should be sampling at 100 kHz.
Next comes the question, what is the highest musical frequency that we perceive? Well, it isn't 20 kHz. Try 200 kHz. As Rupert Neve and others have pointed out, many people can hear the difference between a sine and square wave at 15 kHz. which means they are hearing the first harmonic at least of the square wave, well above what is considered the upper limit of hearing.
Vacuum tubes love to work at high frequencies. Much of the 'classic' studio equipment generally was designed to go out to 22 kHz. with a 3 dB roll-off and then to fall off gradually to 50-60kHz.
By selecting too low a sampling frequency, we are condemned to eternal grainy digital sound, just as when the 525 line standard was adopted for television scan lines in 1947, we have been condemned to grainy TV pictures ever since.
This was a commercial decision. The economic need of consumer electronics giants to find a replacement for everyone's hi-fi equipment led to the development of digital technology which would obsolete the world's turntables. Indeed, CD's have many advantages. They are smaller, easier to store, less prone to physical damage and abuse and they made it possible for
the record companies of the world to take old, dead library material and to re-release it in the new format. This saved them a lot of money since the actual musical production costs were nil.
However, if you take a new digital re-release and play it next to the original LP and compare, there is usually an astounding world of difference.
Most of the musical life has gone out of the music when listened to on the CD.
__________________________________________________
There is much more to read at Walter's:
http://members.aol.com/searsound/articles2.html
