I remember when it came out. It was always a gimmick IMHO.

Valves belong in the past... Or in crazy people's homes in equipment predating cheaper transistors. Old valve radios and stuff are cool and they have their place in history, but things like that motherboard are an abomination and need to be incinerated before even being produced. God if I were part of an alien race and saw that shit I would nuke the whole planet immediately before there was a risk of such stupidity spreading. Really smart move by AOpen there, make a board that could have been µATX take up as much room as a regular ATX one as well as using up a shit ton more power than it needed to.

Honestly, I thought it was an April fools joke when I saw it and I thought it had been when I saw pictures of it over the years. You mean to tell me that they weren't poking fun at audiophiles and that they actually put this into production? If I had any faith left in humanity, I think I would have just lost it.

It's interesting I guess, if purely for how ridiculous it is. It's like those RAMBUS i810 boards, funny as hell and an interesting historical artifact, but little more.

I seen that board on eBay a few months ago but chose not to buy it as I wasn't sure it was functional and I really didn't need it. The tube is there for analog audio and at lest one or two other boards used one as well. The build quality isn't very good to be honest but they have collectors value.

gdjacobs wrote:

I remember when it came out. It was always a gimmick IMHO.

Same here, when I saw it back in 2002 I said to myself "Vacuum Tube? On a PC board? Get Real!".

Here are a couple more reviews:

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4741/9/the-20 … be-amp-included

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/aopentube/

Here is a Youtube video of the AOpen AX4B-533 playing Toto's Africa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzrx173MrtU

Why is that song following me lately? No joke, everywhere I go it is playing. I don't mind the song, it's pretty typical of its time and it's fine, it just seems to keep coming up and it's weird.

Oh, well, let's listen to a song recorded with transistor equipment, being played from a digital source through a tube amp, recorded with a cheap camera (more silicon) and then reproduced again through my transistor amplifier... Audiophiles man, they never cease to amaze.

HighTreason wrote:

If I had any faith left in humanity, I think I would have just lost it.

It might cheer you up somewhat to remember that stuff like this never caught on, and no motherboard makers tried such atrocity in recent years.

This board is absurd... if it wanted to cater to audiophiles that believe tube amps are better (which do exist), then why use a crappy cheap DAC from the Realtek codec? Some audiophiles might like their tubes, but no tube (due to placebo or not) can make something out of an old Realtek DAC sound HiFi - which was noted on other reviews. As it stands, this didn't succeed even with its target audience... unless all AOpen wanted was to grab attention.

The Realtek was half the reason I thought it was an April Fools back then. I can understand catering to that crowd as there are a lot of them, but the tube is bound to also amplify the noise and crap that the cheap Realtek chips will probably produce.

I think it would have been better to just buy a good sound card and hook it up to a tube amp if you really wanted to have one... Which I guess people did because, as you said, it didn't catch on, but there are a lot of tube headphone amps and stuff around these days.

You'd want an off-board DAC feeding into the tube amp.

I've seen that board before.
And I believe it's spelled Audiophools.

G

Hehe, I remember when this board came out. Doubt it makes any sense, but it must sound a little unique and looks pretty sweet in any case, huge caps and all. 😀

Solid state amps have been constructed to drive all loads a tube amp can, with the same or superior characteristics, usually cheaper and more reliably as well. The only thing they don't do better is stand up to atmospheric effects of a high altitude nuclear blast.

Back in the day, Bob Carver would debunk this esoteric amp myth on a fairly regular basis, including one time when he cloned the sound of an audiophile amp in 48 hours without seeing it or knowing what it was. To demonstrate that tubes are not inviolable, he designed and built his own tube amp, then sonically duplicated it using transistors.

I think tube amps are interesting from a historical and nostalgic perspective (kinda like vinyl), but tube amp aficionados are crazy people.
http://hometheaterreview.com/audio-note-gaku- … fiers-reviewed/

* This is like computer users who claim that an add-on sound card outputs SPDIF with less noise. Aside from codecs which force resampling, it doesn't matter.

I think the point with tubes is how they distort the sound, adding a warming effect.

They generally see significant distortion when driven into clipping. Plus, 99% of the time, I want to hear the sound and not the amp.

Finally, this is on a digital computer, right. If you want a warmer sound, just process it.

I also remember when the board first came out and reading a review that admired how they were brave enough to get 300 volts running through a motherboard to power the tube, but that the sound was sub-par.

Personally I think the target market was those "audiophiles" who choose equipment based on the marketing rather than how it sounds. If they can enjoy tube amps where the tubes aren't even plugged in then why not a motherboard with a tube on it 😉

I kind of like this concept of a tube amp. Love it.

In this thread: Lots of people who have never actually listened to decent tube gear. I'm not saying that tube gear is better, but if you believe it's outdated garbage then the honest fact is that you are ignorant. Find yourself a nice, little class-A tube-driven headphone ampilfier, listen to your favorite CD or vinyl, and report back.

I love tube gear... for my guitar that is. The characteristic sound of a bunch of tubes in overdrive works very nicely on a guitar signal.
But that is music *production*. For music *re*production, I don't want the amp to alter the sound, I want it to reproduce it the way the artist intended. Because if I record my tube amp with high quality studio gear, I can get it to sound exactly the way I want on a CD. After that, the CD should just be reproduced as-is, rather than running it through another tube amplifier which may add more distortion, compression or other compromises to the signal.

I would grab one now if I could. In 10 or so years this will become a collectable item. For multiple reasons

1) AOpen are not going to make too many of them (and some will break)
2) It is unique, it combines 2 pieces of technology from 2 different eras (and it works!)
3) by then tube stuff will be even less common than it is now so this has that added bonus

I personally think this is cool (and even practical). Would I use it for my main gaming machine? Maybe not as I assume it is a bit pricey, but they that does not lessen its value.