More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook
In 2007 we did a shootout for The Four Seasons on RCA and noted the following:
For those of you with better tube gear, the string tone on this record is sublime, with that rosin-on-the-bow quality that tubes seem to bring out in a way virtually nothing else can, at least in my experience.
Our experience since 2007 has changed our view concerning the magical power of tubes to bring out the rosiny texture of bowed stringed instruments.
We have in fact changed our minds completely with respect to that rarely-questioned belief.
It’s a classic case of live and learn, and represents one of the bigger milestones in audio that we marked in 2007, a year that in hindsight turns out to have been the most important in the history of the company.
Everything changed dramatically for the better for us sometime in 2005. That’s when we discovered the transistor equipment we still use to this day.
We found a low-power integrated amp made in the 70s that was vastly superior to our custom-built tube preamp and amp. We had an EAR tube phono stage at that time, which we quite liked.
UPDATE 2025
We recently hooked up our old 834p phono stage in the system and did not like the sound at all.
Things change. Boy do they ever!
In 2007 we auditioned the EAR 324P transistor phono stage and immediately recognized it would take our analog playback to an entirely new level, one we had simply never experienced before and really had never thought could possbily exist.