Living with Tube Amplifier

I’ve wanted to listen to a tube amp for ages. Everyone says tube amps are super classy, mostly because they supposedly have this amazing “flavor.”

So I got together with a high school buddy to figure out how to put one together.

He said the circuit and soldering should be fine—schematics are all over the internet—and the tubes are no problem either, you can just buy ready-made ones. Solder it up using the public mold designs online…

So I placed the order. We’d agreed to do the soldering together, but last month his master’s thesis defense was such a pain and kept him so busy that I let him start on his own.

When he finished, he said: after soldering it with someone else’s board, someone else’s case, someone else’s power supply, and someone else’s tubes, it ended up exactly the same as the finished units other people sell. So why not just buy a finished one?

Yeah… for something this cheap, why not just buy a finished one?

First, let’s be clear about the goal: messing with this thing is just to “experience the tube amp flavor.”

So I didn’t have high demands for the sound—just a taste of the flavor was enough. I tried a Mojo DAC first, and it turned out this thing doesn’t demand much from the source; anything decent will do.

How should I put it—because of the characteristics of the tubes themselves, tube amps cut the highs noticeably and the lows don’t feel tight enough, but the sound comes across as very “smooth.” What kind of smooth? The sibilance—that slightly whistling sound—is almost gone, so it feels really comfortable to listen to… I guess that’s what they mean by “flavor.”

I tried pairing it with a few things and found that any source with a bit of competence is fine. After all, it’s a cheap entry-level tube amp—you’re just listening for the flavor, and that was the goal. My buddy said he likes this flavor and is planning to get a more high-end one…

Personally, I don’t think a tube amp is worth investing much in. I even think that if a manufacturer wanted to simulate this “flavor,” it’d be easy—something like EQ could probably do it. But right now we’re in an audiophile era of chasing resolution and technical performance, so a tube amp with weak highs and flabby lows definitely won’t catch the eye of the new generation.

And there’s really no need for a great source anyway—the output gets special effects added regardless, plus a tube amp hums as soon as it’s powered on, and that’s hard to avoid.

In the end I left this thing at work, plugged in a first-gen Creative Live, and listened to old songs—not bad at all.

I recommend using this retro thing to listen to this album by Yang Jiasong; it’s got great feel. Yang Jiasong apparently wrote songs for Tian Zhen and later became a musician himself.