Today’s gadgets and devices are growing smaller each year thanks to the transistor, a simple device that has become the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices. Introduced in the early 1950s, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, allowing the development of smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers. However, some argue that the transistor changed the way music sounds, possibly for the worse. Those who yearn for the purer sound of the early days have turned to the transistor’s predecessor, the vacuum tube. Used for processing or creating electrical signals, the vacuum tube was critical to the development of early electronic technology. It paved the way for the expansion and commercialization of radio communication and broadcasting, television, radar, and sound reproduction. Derived from the resisting property of incandescent light bulbs, vacuum tubes were created to regulate the flow of electricity, amplifying the frequency of an electric signal. This was necessary to amplify the minute vibrations picked up by the needle of a turntable running through the groove of a vinyl record. All of this occurs within the vacuum tube amplifier which sends the processed signal to the speakers to create music. Tube amplification was widely used in the ‘60s and ‘70s until the invention of the cheaper and more compact transistor slowly replaced it in electronic applications. While transistor amplifiers (frequently referred to as solid state) serve the same purpose when amplifying near their peak capacity, they typically create distortion. Vacuum tubes under the same stress conditions saturate… [Read full story]
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