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Valves on a Motherboard? No Way! Way!, as Wayne would say. Yes, folks, some nugget has been and gone and went and done it – walk this way for the daftest bit of kit this side of a left-handed screwdriver… While I was sitting chatting in the PPC Chat Room on
Monday night, one of our regulars dropped a link into the
conversation. It went to
http://www17.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q4/021017/hammer-02.html
and is one link I’d definitely recommend you click on – else you’ll
have no idea what I’m rambling on about this week! (Don’t worry, it
opens in a new window, so you won’t lose your place. Now, forgive me for asking this, but why on earth has someone come up with the idea of using valves on a PC motherboard? It’s actually touted as an Audiophile board – that is to say it’s meant to be aimed at the kind of folks that would buy a Linn-Knekt Kivor hard disk recording system (pictured right) at £12,000 instead of storing their MP3s on an ordinary PC. Now, don’t get me wrong. As many folks know, I’m a guitarist (not a particularly good one, granted) and I prefer to use a Marshall valve amplifier for my electric guitar, rather than a transistorised all-digital job. The reason is simple – a valve amp gives me better tone, a better sound altogether, a sound which matches the kind of thing you’d hear from Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Slash, Richie Blackmore – indeed, most of the top guitarists you’ll hear on record. In that situation, though, my amplifier gets its signal direct from the guitar, with no digital doo-dads in the way to alter it, and the whole thing stays in the analogue domain from the word “go”. What comes out of the speaker is pure analogue sound, with a warm timbre that can only come from a very hot glass tube. So, OK, valves, tubes, call ‘em what you will, produce a sweeter tone, and your Hi-Fi buff is going to prefer valves to transistors. Your average Hi-Fi nut is also likely to prefer vinyl to CD – that’s the kicker, for me. The reason? Vinyl is analogue – it loses very little sound information, while digital recording techniques (MD, CD, DAT mp3 et al) lose audio information all over the place. So, to come back to this motherboard. I can see a few major problems with it: 1. Valves work best with analogue sources – they can’t put back in what the digitisation process takes out. Since everything you do with sound on a PC is digital, the valves are completely wasted. 2. Valves have to run hot. And by hot I don’t mean warm – I mean HOT as in you could cook things on them. We’re talking major quantities of heat inside a case that we’d really rather stayed as cool as possible – just look at the aftermarket in cooling fans and systems for PCs. Why on earth you’d want to bung three small blast furnaces into a PC is a little past my limited powers of understanding. 3. Valves are funny creatures. They don’t take too kindly to having a signal pushed through them before they’ve warmed up (see point 2 above), which means that either you’ve got to slow down the PC’s boot process, so that they’re warmed up before the Windows Startup Sound gets played, or you’ve got to get rid of the startup sound (and anything else that will play before the valves are ready for them. Or change valves pretty regularly… 4. … which you’d have to do anyway, because they wear out. The valves in my on-stage amplifiers get changed once a year, and if I let them run for two years either start sounding flabby or give up the ghost. Given that most folks can’t change a memory stick without palpitations (present company excepted, of course!) they’re going to have trouble changing a valve. 5. This is the thin end of the wedge. Thin end? Oh, yes indeedly-doodly. You must have come across these audiophile types, surely. They spout the desirability of fully directional oxygen free copper multi-strand cores clad in silicon-based 100% pure dielectic material for their loudspeaker cables. They have one end marked for the amplifier, and the other for the speaker. They have arrows on them to show which way the current flows, neatly avoiding the fact that a musical signal is AC! (in other words, it flows both ways!). Check out here and here and, finally here These are the people who stand their speakers and turntables on titchy little spikes that cost – get this - £30 each! Thirty quid for a pointy foot – that means £120 for all four corners of a loudspeaker, and you need two for stereo. Hang on! You can get a new PC for what it would cost you to stand both speakers, the turntable and amplifier on pointy feet! I’ll come clean – I thought, at first, that this motherboard was somebody’s idea of an April Fool’s joke come early (or late) but it isn’t. It’s as real as a very real thing. And it is, in my view, a complete waste of time and money. If it opens the door to the kind of idiotically priced artefacts that have clouded the judgement of the terminally wealthy audiophiles in the PC world, we’re all going to be shafted! My advice? Let that bloke with the concrete loudspeakers perched on pointy feet buy one – save your money for something sensible like a 160GB hard disk and a 20” TFT monitor… Have your say - click here |
