Bluebird Audio -retro vacuum tube amplifiers Vacuum tube amplifiers for music lovers may have vanished from the earth forever - were it not for the simple fact that the rocket scientists of the 40's and 50's developed a way of reproducing hi fidelity sound that has never been surpassed. There are some 22 metal alloys and rare earth chemicals in each vacuum tube, just to give you an expample of the level of sophistication in just an ordinary tube. The tubes we use in the Blueberry Amp are no longer manufactured anywhere on earth...thus they are 50 and 60 years old...and exceedingly rare collector's items all by themselves! .
Oh transistors , solid state technology can match it - but comparing the two is like comparing a painting by a master in the Louvre with a zerox copy of the same painting. Or comparing a Rossini opera to a hip hop gangster rap 'tune' ..if you can call it a 'tune'...Hip Hop and Rap has almost nothing to do with music...nor do photocopies have anything to do with art.
So some factories in Russia , and a few other places now reproduce vacuum tubes. They are popular world wide - so much so that many tube amps can cost you from less than a thousand$, to 4, 5, 6, 18 thousand and more. I say all this to point to why vacuum tube audio is still revered around the world, and highly prized. It is for a good reason. My amps are engineered by a retired electronics engineer, and myself...two old guys - so our hand built amps without overhead could cost $6,000 or more. But by working in our homes, we can make them for less than $2K. There are over $900 in parts; counting 4 big iron transformers that build voltages up to 720 volts peak to peak, and rectified to under 350 volts DC. Vacuum tubes send free electrons across an empty space, thus the extreme high voltages.
Vacuum tube amps are in a very real sense, miniature particle accelerators. This helps explain the awesome reserve power that causes 3 watts per channel to be as loud as a gas lawn mower would be in your living room. The word "distortion" means anything whatsoever added to the sound as it was heard by the microphone in the recording studio. A well engineered amplifier will not 'add' anything to the original recording. The human ear can detect as little as a tenth of one percent distortion. Thus the goal is to design an audio amp that has less than a tenth of a percent. These amps of mine are mesured by sophisticated test equipment to be at seven hundredths of one percent distortion. The loudness is equivalent to sitting in the front rows of a live orchestral concert. Read all about it on my website, bluebirdaudio.us. Remember...Bluebird Audio
( made in the ) dot U.S.