Lately, the desire to replicate the warm auditory memories of my youth has become a musical preoccupation of mine, since I’m secretly-if only aspirationally-in the market for a new stereo. The same could not be said for the Kenwood KR-7200 solid-state receiver I took with me to college-if memory serves, I sold it to a wide-eyed freshman early in my sophomore year. My ears never rang after listening to that, no matter how loud. I grew up listening to music played through my parents’ Fisher 500-C stereo receiver, a tube amp from the early 1960s that did wondrous things to albums like “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones when played at very high volumes. I don’t know much about harmonics, but I can vouch for the sound quality of tube amplifiers. In the 1950s and ’60s, hi-fi systems were marketed as technology that would improve the quality of your life, whether you were nesting (top, left via Modern Mechanix), on the make (top, right via Audio Karma), or bringing a Christmas turkey to the dinner table (above via Retro Vintage Modern Hi-Fi). They are generally worse at the lower frequencies, but our ears don’t hear most of those lower frequency distortions very well, which makes them “sonically benign.” Distortion at high frequencies, however, is easily heard and contributes to listening fatigue (i.e., ringing ears), which may be one of the reasons why tube amps are said to sound warm. (Digital devices run on integrated circuits, and use software to achieve their sound, so they are not considered here.) In particular, most tube amps are regarded as being less likely to create harmonic distortions at higher frequencies than all but the best and most expensive solid-state amps. Uniquely, tube amplifiers, which use vacuum tubes to amplify electrical signals, are said to deliver this sublime auditory experience more reliably than their solid-state counterparts, which use transistors to do the same thing. Warm is intimate, warm is clean and pure, warm doesn’t make my ears ring. For the rest of us, warm suggests rich and rounded tones, notes and chords of such depth the listener can almost imagine he’s in the presence of the singer or musician performing without the aid of microphones or amplifiers. It’s the opposite of what most people would describe as “warm,” which is a narrow, technical term of art among audiophiles. Most painful-emotionally and literally-is the mediocre fidelity of my home stereo system, which teases the listener with the occasional splash of treble or thump of bass, but mostly delivers cacophonous mush. All that matters is that you got lost in the music.” “It doesn’t matter if it’s tubes, transistors, or a hamster on wheel. But I do have trouble hearing someone speaking to me in a crowded restaurant, and certain sounds with the wrong acoustic profile (for me, anyway) will make my ears ring for hours. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was doing lasting damage to the cochlea in my inner ear, and all these years later, I don’t necessarily wince at every sound that happens to be loud. That’s what four or five hours of standing in front of a wall of speakers pumping music at more than 100 decibels will do to a person’s hearing-for the following 30 or 40 minutes, the world sounds soft and muffled, as if the air is thick with invisible clouds of cotton balls. On more than one occasion, I remember stumbling out of Winterland in San Francisco after seeing high-watt bands like Hot Tuna or Pink Floyd, putting the key in the car’s ignition, giving it a turn, and then having no idea whatsoever if the engine had roared to life. Like a lot of adults who attended too many rock concerts in their reckless youth, my hearing is not what it used to be.
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