Tubes on a Chip - Nutube 6P1
Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)
Posts: 1,720
The tubes you’ll find in guitar amps and high-end stereos were first designed in the 30s and 40s, and when you get to really, really advanced tube technology you’d be looking at extremely small tubes made in the 70s for military applications. For 40 years, there really haven’t been many advances in tube technology. Now, at last, there’s something new.
The Nutube 6P1, as this curious invention is called, is a full triode or half of a 12ax7 you’ll find in just about every tube amp ever. Unlike the 12ax7, it consumes 2% of the power required of a normal tube, is 30% of the size of the normal tube, and lasts for 30,000 hours.
This new tube-chip thing was brought to life by Korg, makers of fine musical equipment and Noritake Co., manufacturers of vacuum fluorescent displays. There’s no word on what these tubes will be used in and there’s no data sheet. There will be further announcements this year, so don your speculation spectacles and head to the comments.
Posted in misc hacksTagged korg, tube, tubes, vacuum tube
About Nutube 6P1
http://www.korg.com/us/news/2015/012212/
Image:
The Nutube 6P1, as this curious invention is called, is a full triode or half of a 12ax7 you’ll find in just about every tube amp ever. Unlike the 12ax7, it consumes 2% of the power required of a normal tube, is 30% of the size of the normal tube, and lasts for 30,000 hours.
This new tube-chip thing was brought to life by Korg, makers of fine musical equipment and Noritake Co., manufacturers of vacuum fluorescent displays. There’s no word on what these tubes will be used in and there’s no data sheet. There will be further announcements this year, so don your speculation spectacles and head to the comments.
Posted in misc hacksTagged korg, tube, tubes, vacuum tube
About Nutube 6P1
http://www.korg.com/us/news/2015/012212/
Image:
720 x 480 - 213K
Comments
This seems like a bizarre appeal to the audience of the "it goes to 11" crowd. Totally pointless but exploits that entrenched belief that "tubes are best" that has no basis in fact or logic.
I find this quite disturbing: You see, it turns out that tubes are best. But in totally the opposite way. The humble vacuum tubes like the 12AX7 are in fact the most linear, distortion free, amplifying elements ever made.
What they are doing here is giving tubes a bad image. They are claiming that their amplifying device is as distorting, or more so, that those old tubes. Which they never were.
As an example I present my guitar playing friend who was very proud of his tube based effects box. Sure he could make a lot of interesting sounds with that. When I got to crack the thing open and see what was in it I found what was basically a solid state amplifier with a 12AX7 in the signal path. That tube was being run from a 40v power supply. No wonder it distorted so beautifully!
Generally, harmonics is NOT desired in any kind of amplifier.
Yes, I have read that a lot about even and odd harmonics from tubes and transistors. Never took the time to measure it myself.
I would like to think that in a nicely designed amp the distortion levels are so low as to not make any difference if it's tubes or trannies.
Still, lot's of audio enthusiasts believe they hear the difference and continue buying tube gear. And the electric guitar guys swear by them. So I'm happy, there are still tubes available. I just like tubes.
I love tubes too.
KORG makes all kind of spiffy effects and instrument sets. I'm quite sure they want the harmonics and have identified them and their astethic purpose.
I'm a fan. Go KORG! They make really neat stuff that I want to buy and make music with.
Then I can finally build that vacuum tube based CPU
And Korg just came out with the ARP Odyssey.
It's interesting ARP did not sell off their IP to anyone. Korg was involved back in the day, so they just took it an ran.
http://www.kraftmusic.com/korg-arp-odyssey-duophonic-synthesizer.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=merchant&utm_campaign=kor-odyssey&gclid=Cj0KEQiAjZGnBRCOuJOUo9Xd0sUBEiQAPbicN1Pkqz1sXk7C9Q-K0MVBjSwTjHxzc3J7HHtf7jOY7gMaAndh8P8HAQ
I made quite a bit of money servicing these beasts.
I wonder if any of those 'rich harmonics' are really there. Audiophiles live in a world of mystical beliefs, not cold hard facts. I have always thought that they meant the over-tones and under-tones that a musical instrument provides, not the junk that creeps in with white noise, pink noise, etc.
If this is equal to a 12AX7 without the heater requirement, it could be a useful tube in the audio world. But there are op-amps available that can do everything the 12AX7 did if the tube is running in a clean stable mode (not distortion).
I would be much more excited if this was a power output tube. Trying to get 100 watts of audio out of solid-state devices is daunting. Tubes with conventional heaters break filaments from vibrations at the low audio frequencies.
This may be a rather short-lived audio device. For a few years it may attract sales from the crowd that just believes a tube is the only thing to listen to music through.
As far as I can tell though, this is not aimed at "Audiophiles" but rather those who want to get an interesting sound out of their guitar or whatever. This has nothing to do with faithful reproduction of the input signal.
Also as far as I can tell, if you stretch a wire out along a wooden plank and twang on it the sound it makes it's kind of boring. That is the electric guitar. Jimmy Hendrix and co. would never have gotten anywhere with that. No, what they needed was an amplifier with a shed load of distortion to make it interesting. Enter the Marshal guitar amp. The cheapest piece of c**p Marshal could assemble and actually sell at the time.
And so here we are. Developing new ways to make really bad amplifiers!
We need really good audio capabilities to help everyone enjoy the sonic mess we often find we crave.
He invited me to come and help him do some line of sight range testing on the beach. Luckily I did not. He and another friend were arrested in the dark of night as they were flashing torches to each other to indicate successful reception or not. Seems someone called the cops and reported that there were smugglers in action on the beach!
It all turned out OK, he only got fined for transmitting without a license
Guitar amps with tubes just sound different. They also behave differently when you increase the volume slightly, or when you increase the input from the guitar (by actually turning up the volume with a knob or a pedal, or by just playing harder). There are 'modelling' solid state guitar amplifiers out there which try to synthesize the sound and behaviour of various tube amplifiers, and yes they kind of get into the neighbourhood, but they never manage to get inside the garden. So after some time you lose interest and go back to a tube amp to get the real, not emulated, sound. And anyway a low-watt tube amp is *loud*.. partly because the gain setting changes the sound, and usually you'll need to go pretty high to get the one you want.
Edit: I finally got to read that Korg link.. it didn't work for me at the time this thread was started. Interesting. I guess either it really works, or it doesn't. If it does, I see a great future. 12AX7 was mentioned.. well, there are 12AX7 in my amps so..
Edit2: Let med add that it's not a given that tube guitar amps are "better" - they're just different, and if you want that sound then a tube amp is what you need. But there are many uses for solid state amps too, if that is the kind of sound you want. Obviously. As there are a great many solid state amps on the market. And if you simply want a very clean sound (e.g. for keyboard or bass) solid state is the way to go.
I grew up in the era when the shift a from AM radio to FM and from Mono to Stereo were happening and everything was about high fidelity. Just about the only audio cheat available was the mechanical reverb. The audio tube era as all about High Fidelity, and that meant the rich tones of a complete range that was faithfully reproduced and a minimum of tape hiss, white noise, pink noise, clicks, or pops.
It appears you are of the later 'fuzz tone' era... where electric guitars were channeled through little boxes that added all sort of odd sounds. This began with synthesizers, but soon evolved into little boxes between the audio output and the power amp.
Of course, there was the exceptional 'bad boy' in the tube amp audiophile world -- the Fender Twin Reverb guitar amp. Jimi Hendrix and others worked wonders with feedback that the amp was never intended to achieve.
The simple fact is that the Fender Twin Reverb could just withstand tremendous abuse and still perform... rugged engineering. If not abused, it would faithfully produce whatever the inherent sound of the electric guitar provided.
++++
Having said that, the quality of tube sound has always been much more about the output stages than the pre-amp stage.
The 12AX7 was a mainstay of Tektronics tube oscilloscopes. Tektronics managed to create scope preamps with these tubes that were incredibly flat and faithful. They were wired with real silver wire. In fact, if you get a dual trace 12AX7 plug-in for a Techtronics scope, one can cannibalize it for an incredibly good audio stereo preamp.
All stuff Chip has in his barn I noticed.
Now, I want to see someone come up with chips IN a tube
http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/164878/flametube/p1
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flametube-programmable-piece-of-the-art-light#/
neat, however it would be really cool if you could put a small mcu project together with all the bits in tubes.
Long leads would limit speed I'd guess.
It can be done, and something similar was done many years ago using a ceramic base as a mini circuit board with bare chips. Still have a few samples somewhere.
Like so: http://notabs.org/pictures/2708-eprom
Agreed! Got my '58 Philco Predicta running pretty well and have been loving the smell and sight of the chassis out on the bench. Pity I'll have to put it back in the set eventually, I like being able to see it. Had fun watching Mr Smith goes to Washington the other night.
And some things just sound right through tube gear. For example, Johnny Cash through the phono input of my Hallicrafters SX-43 to a R-46B speaker sounds just right. Classical through the same set up sounds terrible.
Jonathan
Without further analysis, and much much help from someone that realy understands vacuum tubes operational parameters and their associated filters and biasing componentes, I can't blame the SX-43's audio stage for being guilty of some bad sounding classical music programs, but to believe in a spec sheet that I found thru Google ( hug-a-bug.com/R-46.html ), R-46B speaker's dynamic range falls between 80 Hz to 5000 Hz, suitable for voice intensive contents (thus the Johnny Cash succesful hearing) but surely not enough for the 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz range, needed to a good hearing experience in reproducing classical music.
Henrique
You usually see tubes used in preamps because of this; it's less of a factor in amps further down the line because the first preamp has already clipped the signal. However you can, as with guitar amps, get more distortion deliberately by overdriving later amplification stages. Early power amps were severely overdriven in concert venues and that created a lot of the classical characteristic distortion of the electric guitar sound.