Speaker efficiency?

If a big speaker is inside a BIG box , it will be useful.

Those small BOOSE boxes are not.

First and foremost, you need to be comparing speakers by identical units of power. There are some very bizarre and totally misleading figures quoted by certain manufacturers to make their speakers appear more powerful than they really are. One you've got that straight, you can begin to compare power consumed vs. sound pressure generated:

Hey Eric, Can I ask why the tube amp obsession? If you're interested in how they work, then you could fix up some old one or build your own.

George H.

A surprising number of people find the subtle 2nd harmonic distortion of a valve amp to be very agreeable.

It looks like all the speaker specs I have seen don't have enough info to tell how efficient they are. None say how much sound pressure they produce per watt consumed. I just wanna buy online. I live on an island and loathe going over to the mainland to shop. Traffic and crowds make me uncomfortable. Eric

It's not an obsession. It's just that I need a new stereo because the old one crapped out. The stereo will be in the area where we entertain and so it should look pleasing. To me at least. I have always exposed tubes, ever since I was a little kid. We had a big tube radio with a mafic eye tuner tube and I loved that. My grandfather was a sound engineer who worked for Bell Labs. He had a sound lab in one room of the house and when we would visit the grandparents I would always get to check out his lab. There were several oscilloscopes as well as equipment with exposed, glowing tubes. So that's why I want a tube amp. It needs to sound good to me and look good to me. It's gonna be connected to am MP3 player so it's not like I abhor silicon. If I had the time I would build one. And maybe down the road I will. Tubes are way different than solid state stuff. Eric

"Tubes are way different than solid state stuff."

Hi Eric, well first I know almost nothing about tubes, and not much more about audio amps driving speakers. But I've heard that tubes are like Fets. And (being a class A type of guy.) for Fet's you have the things like the Zen Amp (Nelson Pass). And I'm thinking you could do the same thing with a tube... run it class A, and with the right output transformer ('cause of the higher voltage for tubes) You are done. (class A is easy to make and understand.. it just wastes boat loads of power.)

Comments from audio types welcome.

George H.

I am looking at class A amps. And the amp will help heat the house in the winter. It never gets too hot here on Whidbey Island so the extra heat in the summer won't be a burden. Eric

It is more a matter of what makes you feel good. Tubes are nice with their cheerful glow and well-behaved characteristics. I understand their esthetic appeal, and having grown up with tubes I do miss building tube amps.

But if sound matters, you'd be hard pressed to build a better amp than the Nelson Pass Zen amps, particularly some of the iterations that have refined the basic Zen.

You will still generate heat... AND if you want, you could use one of the designs that uses big 100W incandescent lamps for the positive resistance coefficient of tungsten to supply the ballast to the current regulator for Class A. Check out some of the Pass designs that people have built, some are downright sexy. Building from scratch takes longer and is more rewarding... any idiot can slap together a kit.

default, so is there some older class A tube amp that Eric could buy used or something. (This is mostly a selfish question, 'cause I would find that more interesting than having him buy some ebay thing.)

George H.

Last time I looked there were lots of tube amps and some pretty good ones, but there wasn't much in the way of class A. These days it can be an expensive proposition to build from scratch.

I few years back I managed to latch onto a pair of 811A's and ceramic sockets for a Tesla coil exciter. That set me back close to $100 and would probably be lots more today.

I get where you are coming from... Some of those Ebay thingees use tubes I've never heard of. When I was a kid I had access to lots of junked old TV's and radios so most of the time I only had to come up with money for the chassis. (and some of my creations went into upside down cake pans)

OK thanks, just a pipe dream on my part.

George H.