Cognitive or psychological effects on the perception of audio are fascinating.<p>I had a friend in sound production tell me that he had the experience of ramping up sliders to show an effect to a client and watching their faces brighten at the improvement. Then, he noticed something was misconfigured and the sliders were doing nothing.<p>That said, there are people who can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3s and uncompressed, because they can sense the faint temporal errors that can make a sound a touch before the sound they should follow.
So, basically the tubes only exist to glow. And to disable the circuit when they're removed. Clever.<p>I'm not surprised. Most of the cheap devices containing tubes I see use a starved plate design, where the tubes are operating well below their ideal range, use a LED for "lightning" (because there's often no AC power to light up the tube filaments), all coupled with $1 reject tubes. Sure, it distorts very easily, so they can be used on music making, but so would a pair of diodes. This is just the next step in the evolution.
It's pretty well known and stated that these are hybrid amps with solid state output stages. Was this not known in 2018?<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nobsound-MS-10D-Tube-Power-Amplifier/dp/B00KFGKKR2" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Nobsound-MS-10D-Tube-Power-Amplifier/...</a><p>Arent't the tubes just the preamp stage?
You know what happens, though, this is one fake Chinese tube amplifier but what happens if someone makes a fake fake Chinese tube amplifier? At a certain point, like with miomg (either guerilla marketing on a blog, or an actual flash card with merit, or both), you just make the real thing. Like even cheap fake watches have a real 32.768 KHz oscillator inside, which are like 22 cents. That's better than almost all mechanical watches, and it's very hard to fuck that up, because it's the cheapest oscillator by far, and making even a fake watch is actual work, and because hey maybe maybe there's a repeat sale.<p>I'm considering buying this fake Chinese tube amp amplifier to figure out what's up, they used their smarts to fake the tube function, but those are still smarts. Might help with IP protection, ironically.
I'm curious how long the current state of affairs w.r.t. Chinese fake products sold to Americans will last.<p>So far I'm not aware of any changes to the fundamental drivers that enable / motivate this.
Well, it looks good!<p>I'm pretty convinced that as long as whatever-it-is looks the part, we don't care. And it could be tech like this, white goods (which are just a branding exercise), real estate even, and then even more ephemeral things like things we are presented with on screens. For most of us, even if we are holding something in our hands, how can we tell if is fake or not?