Seduced by the pure music of virgin commies - vacuum tube brand from the U.S.S.R

SEDUCED BY THE PURE MUSIC OF VIRGIN COMMIES Some audiophiles will look anywhere, even to the U.S.S.R

It's a warm, rainy March morning in Hollywood, 40 years after theinvention of the transistor. At the Mastering Lab, one of the finest lacquer-cutting (lathing a master) studios in the world, recording engineer Doug Sax is cranking up half a million dollars' worth of customized electronics. In this cutthroat business, his studio flourishes on its reputation for accuracy in two complex systems: Sax's ear and his audio gear. The ear is a product of decades of experience and eons of evolution. And the electronics? From his power amplifiers comes the quaint glow of vacuum tubes.

Across the Los Angeles basin, in Pasadena, James Boyk is teaching a laboratory class at Caltech on the technology of music reproduction. Boyk, a pianist, is an artist-in-residence and lecturer at the school, not an engineer. But his obsession with the purity of the recordings of his concerts has made him an authority on audio equipment. His Prokofiev Sonata No. 6 is prized among audiophiles for being a rare example of a recorded piano sounding like one being played live. Boyk's basement lab is rather warm today, not just because of the weather but also because of the racks of vacuum tube chassis heating up the air.

That tubes have survived four decades into the solid-state era and are considered by many experts superior to transistors runs counter to the usual pattern of technological progress, which doesn't suffer outdated ideas gladly.

For readers born after 1960, it may be necessary to say a few words right here about what a vacuum tube is. Its development traces back to the last decades of the nineteenth century, when scientists were learning about electrons. While doing research on thermionic emissions, Thomas Edison and others noticed that electric currents in an evacuated enclosure would flow from a hot filament to a cold metal plate. The renowned English physicist J. J. Thomson showed in 1897 that these currents were particles of a definite charge and mass. By the first decade of the twentieth century another English physicist, J. A. Fleming, and Lee De Forest, an American, were putting this discovery to practical use. A device called a Fleming valve (later known as a diode) could change the weak alternating currents picked up by a radio to direct currents that would actuate a meter. De Forest added a third element, a metallic grid, between the hot, negatively charged cathode and the cold, positively charged anode of Fleming's tube. By increasing the voltage between the cathode and the grid, the new tube could enhance the flow of electrons to the anode, enabling amplifiers to be placed along telephone lines to facilitate long-distance calls. De Forest named his invention the Audion.

The De Forest tube and its numerous offspring, which all worked on the same principle, were even more critical to the development of radio, especially commercial broadcasting. This was reflected in the increase in U.S. tube production from about a million a year in the early 1920s to 100 million annually two decades later. Military use during World War II fueled a $400 mil- lion-a-year business that grew even bigger in the 1950s as Americans began buying television sets. You can bet someone's over 30 if he remembers the tube-testing console once found in many drugstores. This device allowed the average citizen to participate in the electronic age by determining for himself which tubes unplugged from his radio or TV needed replacement.

By the mid-1960s the transistor, which had been invented in 1947and slowly began to displace the vacuum tubes in computers and military electronic devices, was taking over in consumer electronics; it was during this period that advertising campaigns made the term solid-state synonymous with high tech in the public's mind. The tube, it seemed certain, was dead and buried.

The reasons: 1) transistors could do the same work as tubes, while using far less power and generating much less heat, and 2) they could be packed more closely together. For computers these advantages were decisive; for other products they were significant. But in high-fidelity audio equipment, transistors brought with them a disadvantage that was often overlooked: transistorized circuits sounded dreadful compared to those with tubes.

''I think everybody now agrees that solid-state gear was execrable when it first appeared,'' says Boyk. ''Recently it has begun to sound almost as good as tube equipment, but at far higher cost.''

While that statement may seem innocent enough, it's heresy to many mainstream circuit designers -- and a lot of technologists in other fields. At the heart of the debate in the audio industry is an engineering issue far broader than tubes versus transistors. It's one that touches all areas of high technology, right up to the largest aerospace, military, and nuclear projects: the value of empirical evidence compared to that of theoretical measurements and specifications. ''Electrical engineers, especially the ones who design recording equipment, can prove that there is no difference in tube or transistor sound,'' wrote recording engineer Russell Hamm in an article published in 1973 by the American Audio Engineering Society. ''They do this by showing the latest specification sheets and quoting electronic figures which are visually quite impressive. It is true, according to the parameters being measured, that there is only a marginal difference in signal quality But are there some important parameters which are not being measured?''