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Looper's Delight
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>>A tube/load circuit creates a kind of filter. That warmth people often >speak of is just high frequency attenuation.<< agreed, but only if the designer has intended this effect..... which is probably where the market-speak "warmth" really comes from- a slightly wooly sounding top-end, especially when compared with a modern recording. but I have a couple of valve tape-decks that meet or exceed the frequency response of their nearest "solid-state" peers. see, for the last twenty-odd years, producers & engineers have been putting more & more top-end onto recordings, safe in the knowledge that it will actually reach the ears of the end-user via digital media. this sort of delivery couldn't be guaranteed with analogue tape or vinyl. (& before all the howls of protest start, I said it couldn't be guaranteed, not that it was impossible! I have witnessed the work of studer & shibata.) so we've all got used to much higher energy levels in that part of the spectrum. now the marketing guys have created an artificial association between the use of vacuum tubes & some mythical era in which there was a bit less top-end listener-fatigue, & songwriting was generally of a higher quality, life was simpler, gas was cheaper, tv shows were better, beer didn't have chemicals in it...... warm = good, cold = bad. (beer excepted) analogue = warm. digital = cold. & so ironically we have arrived at a situation where on the one hand we complain that 44.1kHz is nowhere near fast enough of a sampling rate to preserve all the detail of real-life sounds, while on the other we're using valve circuits that have been deliberately badly designed so as to soften the transients & high-frequencies we were so anxious to save. so if you want your songs to last forever, like one presumes lennon/mccartney or brian wilson's will do, you have to use OLD EQUIPMENT. or at least, equipment made the old way, with glass in it. this is why we had to endure "the white stripes", this kind of marketing.... 2nd hand cred.... & you can buy a plug-in to simulate tape-saturation! what's that all about? no! buy a real revox! I'm ranting, aren't I? :-) ok. back to the science. running a valve at a low voltage won't make it glow less; the glow comes from the heater & the cathode, to a lesser degree. running a valve at a very high voltage will occasionally produce an additional blue glow, especially if the cathode's almost stripped. the LED installed by EH, behringer & korg (amongst others) is there because the real glow wasn't bright enough to satisfy their designers, probably because modern tubes have a little more suspension material in them, & it hides the "interesting" bits. d.