Here's what I know about tubes: - Backintheday they were made by major electronics manufacturers like RCA, Westinghouse, Philips and the like - Major manufacturers switched from oh-shit-expensive tubes to cheap-as-dirt transistors as soon as it became an option - Russian tubes became available after the end of the Cold War because Soviet military doctrine favored vacuum tubes due to their insensitivity to clumsy production, resistance to nuclear electromagnetic pulse effects and independence from rare-earth mining concerns, fueling a resurgence of tube technology amongst those backlashing against the (then-parallel) rise of digital technology - This resurgence blossomed into its own niche community where the old Soviet and Chinese factories found customers to keep them around decades after they should have sunk into oblivion If it sounds like I'm down on tubes, it's because I am. The advantage of tube technology is it produces a rich sine distortion wave full of harmonics, much like an electric guitar. Digital distortion is square waves with few harmonics, much like every awful sound you've ever heard. HOWEVER, the larger world moved on from "pleasing distortion" because "no distortion" is much handier from any sensible perspective and fuckin' A, if I want something to sound like a Marshall stack when I push it to hard I got plugins for that. Beyond that, tubes are stupidly inefficient. They reflect a paradigm abandoned by the larger audio world pretty much as soon as MOSFETS became available. And yes, I recognize that efficiency isn't all that yadda yadda yadda but the reality is, every 3dB of increased level costs a doubling of power so if you're listening to Bach on your 3W tube amp at 70dB, it's going to take 24W to give you 10dB of headroom and that's a boat anchor like this and I hate to break it to you, but the dynamic range of a CD (which should be our benchmark, because if your vinyl can't beat a CD what's the point) is 96dB which means if you want to listen to your Bach at 70dB and you want 20dB of headroom like a normal home stereo you're looking at a 200W tube amp and those are simply not available. On the other hand, go browse QSC or Crown or any other legit amp manufacturer not concerned with Atmos and the like - you'll have a tough time finding an amp less than 200W per channel. Meanwhile those are RMS values; peak is no longer listed 'cuz it doesn't matter since you can now buy farad-grade capacitors to give you as much soak as you could possibly want. Tube amps? Tube amps the RMS is pretty much the peak because of the architecture. Yeah, tubes sound better when they distort but they'll distort a lot sooner than solid state. I know of three communities that still use tubes: Guitar geeks (audio), hi fi geeks (audio) and physicists (not audio). The guitar geeks and the hi fi geeks are choosing between vintage and former eastern block crap. The physicists are paying real money because there's no other way to do a photomultiplier tube and damn skippy if they could hop to the head of the IC line they would. More than you asked but there you go vintage tubes are better because they were used by citizens, modern tubes are crap because the only people buying them are the fringe. And better is still crap.
I agree with everything you said. Part of the Russian tube legend is that they lagged the solid state advances of the west, so their factories survived long enough to meet the latent demand once western stockpiles were gone. But that might be a remnant of the Cold War, portraying the enemy as technologically inferior. I enjoy tubes the way some people enjoy cars. My hifi is objectively inferior and more expensive than modern equipment the way a similar vintage muscle car is objectively inferior and more expensive than a modern muscle car. Also more than you asked for.
I can totally respect that. A great friend of mine has some Zus and some tiny riduculous little tube amp that distorts like a muther whenever he pushes it even a tiny little bit, which is usually to watch Youtube videos. Meanwhile, he's made the Woody Allen argument that all movies should be mono so the soundtrack doesn't detract from the picture all the while knowing that I make most of my money mixing 5.1 and am seriously contemplating becoming the only Atmos rig north of San Francisco. The general inferiority of Soviet equipment may/may not have been a deliberate strategy by the USSR to cause the west to underestimate domestic market gear based on sub-par export models. At the same time, the performance encouragement provided by a free market economy is not present in a command economy and absent self-driven loyalty and self-sufficient pride of workmanship, the two manufacturing paradigms do not compete fairly. I think it was Hoffman who pointed out that when the overwhelming majority of your manufacturing expertise is given over to military uses, you end up at a keen disadvantage in the consumer marketplace. It's not that a tank factory can't make frying pans. It's that a tank factory can't make frying pans most people can afford and switching over from making top of the line precision hardware to economy bakeware requires significant retooling, both spiritual and actual.