Cryogenic tubes?

[calaverasgrandes]

https://www.tubeworld.com/kuhltube.htm#
Seems like snake oil to me, please convince me otherwise.

[Gentleman Jim]

You can't ever be truly convinced by another person; you can only convince yourself.

I find their lack of a money back guarantee to be somewhat less than encouraging, but there's next to no chance that I'd be a customer anyway. The sound of my tubes is nowhere near the weakest link in my playing.

[calaverasgrandes]

honestly, I could care less if they were doing this to chinese, Yugo and Russian tubes. But they are doing this with NOS Mullards, Telefunkens and RCAs! Stuff I would like to get my hands on if I could afford it.
I am not a fantastic musician but I like what a good vintage tube does for an amp or a mic pre.

[dsw]

Total bullshit.

All the high end stereo dudes do this to their gear. Since they ran out of green sharpies to fix their CD's.
The "theory" behind cryogenic freezing is it "aligns" the atoms.


Right.


I had a customer who swore by it. Here's an exact quote from him: "at first I didn't hear any difference, but then after about 200 hours of listening....there it was!"

I swear you could sell these guys a bridge.

[dsw]

Good tubes are good tubes for sure, but you should not freeze them.

[Scodiddly]

Those audiophile systems are usually shown in a shoebox of a living room, with no acoustic treatment.

'nuff said.

[ubertar]

I think snake oil gets a bad rap. Yeah, it was definitely over-hyped as a cure-all, but probably has as much Omega-3s in it as fish oil.

[calaverasgrandes]

snake meat just tastes like it has to be healthy. Like white meat chicken meets trout.
So snake oil must be?
I am gonna go ask a glass sculptor I know what they think about anealing glass down to subzero. I know what it does to windshields.

[Andy Peters]

https://www.tubeworld.com/kuhltube.htm#
Seems like snake oil to me, please convince me otherwise.

Bullshit.

[jgimbel]

In China snake oil is still widely used to rub on joints for pain relief. Snake oil originally came over here as a remedy used by Asian workers working on the railroad in the western US, and they gave it to the Europeans that were there (who didn't think it did anything, which is how we got the term). You can also get it in pill form in China just like fish oil pills here.

[JGriffin]

Problem is, once you distill it down to pill form most of the efficacy is lost. Especially with those Omega-3s.

[emrr]

Never heard any.

Cooling would contract all the various materials, and possibly relax some stress points between materials, and the warm up could possibly re-expand materials into more evenly distributed relative positions. Only thing I can think of. No idea at all if it would change anything detectable. Might. Am I worried about it? No. If I had a lot of $ I might experiment for my own elucidation.

I'm not voting since there's no option for 'no idea or opinion'.

[ubertar]

Problem is, once you distill it down to pill form most of the efficacy is lost. Especially with those Omega-3s.

I've only seen fish oil in capsules, not pills. But maybe that's what you meant. From what I gather, so long as it's not exposed to too much sunlight, the fatty acids should hold up pretty well. UV light breaks them down.

[aurelialuz]

i find it hard to believe that tubes have been around for 90 years and this, if it works so well, has never been discovered by the hundreds of thousands of people who have worked with them.

[djimbe]

Cooling would contract all the various materials, and possibly relax some stress points between materials, and the warm up could possibly re-expand materials into more evenly distributed relative positions.

Some materials experience a change to their crystal structure at low temps. Such changes can actually build in MORE stresses than would be present at room or elevated temps. The classic example is hydrogen embrittlement in carbon steels. Look up what happened to the "Liberty Ships" the US sold Great Britain in the late 30's. Damn things broke up once they got to the North Sea, because the cold water changed the basic structure of the steel crystals which negatively affected the properties of the hull materials. Dudes died, and lotsa shit hit the ocean floor.

The other factor is that contraction of two mated parts MAY possibly relieve some compressive residual stresses, but what about tensile ones? Contraction can make them even worse. Plus you got a buncha different materials in a vacuum tube, and those things ALL have different coefficients of thermal expansion. Imagine a part that changes very little with change in temp surrounded by one that changes a great deal. The outer part is gonna shrink like a bitch and bind on the inner one (possibly breaking one or the other), especially when you're talking temp changes in the area of 250 deg. F. where dimensional changes can be measurably large.

Like many audiophile upgrades, this one smacks of desiring (or wishing for) a result more than understanding any physics behind what may or may not be going on...