Old TVs, early supercomputers, and modern fancy sound equipment all use vacuum tubes. But why? What does a vacuum tube do?
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The two main uses of vacuum tubes in audio are for home stereo systems and in guitar amps.
In both situations they are amplifiers. They take a tiny electric current and turn it into a very big one that can physically move a speaker cone.
You can easily make high quality amplifiers with semiconductors (transistors) that are very powerful and much cheaper. So why do people still like tubes? It’s because of what happens when you send too much signal into the input.
In both cases you get distortion. However the distortion created by a tube amp is more pleasant sounding.
That makes sense when you’re playing guitar and you *want* a distorted sound. You deliberately over drive the input to your amp because you like the sound that results. Also back when electric guitars were invented, tube amps were the only options. So the original sound of the electric guitar, by definition, was that of a tube amp.
But when you’re talking about listening to already recorded music on your home stereo…you shouldn’t be over driving the input. So the kind of distortion produced by the amp shouldn’t really matter.
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