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Old 03-02-2009, 05:37 PM   #418
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BoxOfSnoo View Post
Well strictly looking at the transistors, yes, most of us can, golden ears or not. It shows up all the time when a person hears a killer tone and tries to replicate it. They just can't seem to get the same fuzz tone because their silicon-based fuzzface is too harsh. You can hear this live as well as recorded, so it's not purely a recording phenomenon, either. It's at least a big of a difference as string gauge! Maybe focusing on fuzz is cheating because of the huge significance of the transistor makeup.
I'm going to push this, because I think it's an important distinction, and maybe I phrased the question badly the first time around-- are you seriously arguing that you (or anyone) can reliably hear the material used in transistors, to the point where if I posted 20 guitar clips you could tell which had germanium and which had silicon transistors, and which had something else entirely?

Note that I am emphatically NOT talking about taking a fuzz-face and clipping out and replacing the diode (which anyone could hear), I'm talking about the difference between circuits designed from the ground up to sound good using whatever kind of components.

Saying that a fuzzface sounds different with different transistors is a categorically different thing from saying that the presence of a silicon transistor automatically imparts a specific sound to any circuit. If you were to design a circuit using silicon transistors that deliberately introduced reverse leakage comparable to a germanium transistor I bet you'd have a hard time telling the sonic output apart. I mean, you might be able to to tell one from the other in a straight A/B test, but I doubt that you'd be able to do much better than guess which had the germanium transistor.

Quote:
But you know there's a difference in broken-in equipment. It does sound different. Really, it does. My point was, older well-used equipment is almost always different sounding than fresh off the factory, even if you have the same circuit and same specs. So you can't simply dismiss it saying that it's just in our imagination. There is some science to it, and we haven't really nailed down exactly what it is that makes it sound "vintage".
We haven't nailed down anything. Older equipment sounds different, but so does one piece of newer equipment to the next. Two Stratocasters that came off the same factory line on the same day will sound different.

My argument is emphatically NOT that the difference between one piece of kit and another is illusory. In fact I stipulated pretty early in this thread that EVERYTHING matters. That COULD be read as a reason to pursue every picayune detail down to the Nth technical degree, or it could be reason to just leave it up to the amp and instrument manufactures to figure that stuff and just find stuff that matters to one's own sound. Either approach is entirely valid.

There is a bit of dialog in the film Time Bandits that goes something like this:

"So now you're the leader of this group?"
"No, we agreed not to have a leader."
"Right, so shut up and do as I say."

Wherever there is controversy or uncertainty, interested parties will rush in and use the UNCERTAINTY ITSELF as proof that they are right. This can be seen everywhere, in a lot of political debates for example. The line is that if you can't prove X, therefore the truth must be Y. Which is patently false as a logical test.

Please note that I am not accusing Boxofsnoo of anything like this. But when some people are saying the issue is black, and some white, it is very hard to make a sincere case for the answer being "unknown" without being pushed into one camp or the other, or without having people therefore read you as saying it is some shade of gray. Gray is not the same as unknown. And you don't have to espouse one side to doubt the conclusions of the other.

Quote:
...So each guy needs to know where to go shopping to get the right tone. Sometimes you need to start in the vintage aisle.
I have no disagreement at all with people whose favorite piece of gear is "vintage."

If anyone is certain that loose tubes or germanium diodes or old speakers are the key to great sound, then I have no argument with their personal preferences, but I do expect a technical defense if they expect their assessment to be treated as empirical fact.
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