Landins
Well-known member
A triode on a chip. Is the future here?
http://www.korg.com/us/news/2015/012212/
http://www.korg.com/us/news/2015/012212/
JohnRoberts said:I'd be careful about reading too much into a marketing release. It looks like they have used their display technology to make a low power tube. I find it a little disturbing that they claim "distortion" as a feature but for an effects device this is not crazy, just not obviously a better vacuum tube, perhaps a better tube for that one application (making distortion)...
Back decades ago I recall some development work to make a tube on a an IC substrate and they etched a point electrode that could emit free electrons inside the IC (without a heater IIRC). I don't recall any future development progress on that esoteric IC technology. Perhaps the world doesn't really need new tubes.
JR
PRR said:> Tube on a chip
> oh, this one has a rectangular shape... wow
It is not a "chip". Flat glass box with a hard vacuum inside.
joaquins said:JohnRoberts said:I'd be careful about reading too much into a marketing release. It looks like they have used their display technology to make a low power tube. I find it a little disturbing that they claim "distortion" as a feature but for an effects device this is not crazy, just not obviously a better vacuum tube, perhaps a better tube for that one application (making distortion)...
Back decades ago I recall some development work to make a tube on a an IC substrate and they etched a point electrode that could emit free electrons inside the IC (without a heater IIRC). I don't recall any future development progress on that esoteric IC technology. Perhaps the world doesn't really need new tubes.
JR
I'd like to see such a thing working, emitting electrons at ambient temperature? what material would that be? interesting, at least for learning purposes... quite a lot of physics involved in something like this.
JS
Saw it. Noritake makes vacuum-fluorescent displays, and it's very easy to make one into an amplifying triode. It's a very poor triode, mind you. Directly heated filament so it needs a negative grid bias voltage. Will NOT plug into existing equipment. The filament in VF displays is very fine and tends to vibrate, so such a tube will be microphonic. Low gain too.
Yes, people have known about this for a long time:
http://www.qsl.net/m0ayf/VFD-Regen.html
http://hpfriedrichs.com/radioroom/vfd/rr-vfd.htm
http://www.electronicpeasant.com/projects/ringmod/trmod.html
Easy to predict what will happen to this: idiot guitarists will ask "hey man, is it like a 12AX7, man". They will be told "no", and the only sales will be for a few Korg products. Which will tank because the tube-thing is microphonic.
I would not be surprised if Korg made this announcement in a desperate attempt to injure the sales of their principal supplier of guitar-amp tubes, the ruthless Mike Matthews. Everybody hates Mike. In which case, Korg may or may not even be planning to mass-produce them.
PRR said:Produced by the many-millions for decades, with incredible reliability, but fading under pressure from LCD displays. Left-over technology.
PRR said:19 cent opamps.
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