[marcosdumay]

I'd bet computers will be emulating the sound of vacuum tubes way before any of those things get into market.

You can get the correct vacuum tube-like amplification from a computer today, it's just that tubes are still cheaper. A/D converters and first stage linear amplifiers are only getting cheaper (even at this, post Moore's law era), thus it's only a matter of time before computers retire valves on yet another application.

EDIT: Also, tunnel devices have a completely different behavior from macroscopic valves. They are very non-linear, what makes them great at digital applications, but horrible sound amplifiers.

[mbenjaminsmith]

> You can get the correct vacuum tube-like amplification from a computer today, it's just that tubes are still cheaper.

It is absolutely not the case that tube amplifiers are still sold because they're cheaper than solid state amplifiers + DSP. Their sounds is preferred and they are much, much more expensive to produce.

The valves (which don't enjoy the economies of scale they once did) are only part of the cost. The power supply of a tube amp is usually more complex than a solid state amp and they generally need output transformers because of high output impedance -- transformers that are linear through the audible band are expensive to produce.

At scale you could easily build a SOTA DSP card suitable for emulating "tube sound" for less than the cost of a single channel output transformer. Line 6, among others, have built businesses based on that fact.

[xellisx]

They already do. Check out Line6.com

[spiritplumber]

Won't prevent audiophiles from being audiophiles. I remember reading a screed against double-blind testing on some magazine (would link to, but can't find it)

[marcosdumay]

Audiophiles are funny.

I had a huge problem of making an D/A converter with enough precision for instrumentation a while back, but designing some digital I/O with enough bandwidth for it was a nightmare. Then I looked at the Internet and saw an audiophile complaining that a soundcard[1] with 20dB less noise than my design was crap.

1 - A PCI express card, of course. Didn't try that bus. I'd have a really bad time manualy creating a board for it.