[WireNut]

This Cryo Treatment just doesn't sit easy with me. Let's talk about it 

Why would anyone want to take an engineered piece of audio equipment like a vacuum tube and dump it into a 300 degree below zero solution?

[SteveFord]

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=107797.0

[decal]

 

[Elizabeth]

I bought some cryo'ed tubes and plan on a few more. I bought pairs of various brands. I want a few more in house before i start comparing them.
(In my VAC Standard preamp)
IMO most of the naysayers have the usual EE issues of rigid thinking about nonstandard ways of electronics. (Same as wires.. etc)
Clearly PLENTY  is happening to cryo'ed stuff with all sorts of tools, engine parts etc shown to benefit from the process as a permanent change (though I like the guy in the other post who has decided it can't be permanent, just by deciding it can't.)

And folks pay a small fortune for small variations in tube performance, taking a crapshoot on used or so called NOS tubes all the time. So what is the problem with trying something else?
Just MY grousing..

[Ericus Rex]

(though I like the guy in the other post who has decided it can't be permanent, just by deciding it can't.)

I guess you're probably talking about me there.  Let me ask you just a few questions which may or may not end up explaining my skepticism.

If you return the metal to liquid form (remelt it), would the metal retain its cryo'd crystalline structure?  If your answer is "Yes" then read no further.  If your answer is "Of course not," than you admit that heat can undo the process.

Do we agree that the melting of a metal is not an instantaneous conversion of one crystalline structure to another?  I hope your answer is "Yes" to that one.  As we add heat to a metal, the crystalline structure will gradually begin moving and shifting into another structure altogether.  This is how we anneal and harden metals.  In ferous metals, we can heat the piece up to bright red-orange which arranges the structure in a very organized and strong pattern and then quench it which just locks the structure in that pattern.  If we let the hot metal gradually drop back down to room temp it would just re-pattern itself into the softer structure it was before heating.

Now, in normal tube usage we don't heat the metal to melting temps so the question then becomes "at what temp do we get the atoms of tube components hot enough so that they begin to move around and restructure themselves?"  I don't know the answer to that one.  The heater filament is heated up to glowing orange (1,100-1,200C - yes, that's Celsius.  Pretty friggin hot!).  Since glowing orange will significantly change the structure in ferous metals I'm left to assume the filament's cryo treatment would be undone.  The cathode is very close to the heater.  I imagine it gets to within 200-300 degrees of the filament's temp.  I also imagine that this is hot enough to undo cryo treatment to the cathode.  The grid(s) and plate however, are farther from the filament and shielded from the filament's heatby the cathode so it is entirely possible that they retain some, possibly all, of the the cryo treatment's restructuring.

So, to say that the treatment is 'permanent' I feel is not entirely true.  But if you read my last post in that thread, I do believe I accepted the results of the A/B comparison.  Some of the benfits of cryo-ing are retained after hours of usage.

In this 'hobby' I feel a certain amount of skepticism about the claims of tweeks is healthy.  I hope you feel the same.

[Ethan Winer]

Why would anyone want to take an engineered piece of audio equipment like a vacuum tube and dump it into a 300 degree below zero solution?

Wouldn't that fracture the glass? I'd think so! I wonder if companies that claim to cryo tubes actually do anything. Maybe they just re-pack the tubes and ship them back to you. How would anyone know if they did or not? And why should cryo treatment improve the sound rather than make it worse? Logically, it makes no sense that freezing stuff would do anything useful. If it did, it would be trivial to show a real improvement with Before and After specs for distortion and frequency response etc. Do any cryo vendors offer such proof? If not, why not?

--Ethan

[srb]

There is easily to acertain proof that cryogenic treatment can increase hardness and reduce physical frictional wear in metals, however even NASA as far as I can tell has never treated electronics cryogenically.  They do cool sensitive sensors to cryogenic temperatures to reduce the self-noise that would be greater than the low level phenomena they are trying to measure, but that is operating them at constant cryo temperatures, not subjecting them to a one-time treatment.

Steve

[jneutron]

Wouldn't that fracture the glass? I'd think so!

Not necessarily.  It depends on the rate of cooldown, the level of stress built into the glass during manufacture, and how smooth the invar or kovar is at the seals.  Rough invar/kovar surfaces can cause stress concentrations which can start crack formation if the TCE's aren't well matched.

The balance of your post is moot given this info.

I do note however, that there are significant differences between material improvements and electrical improvements to be had with cryogenic treatment.

In ferrous alloys, thermal treatment below the martensitic finish temperature causes the crystalline atomic lattice to fully change over to a final lattice structure.  This is the ol' BCC vs FCC thingy..

In the electrical realm, I've not heard or seen any reasonable effect or explanation given for any electrical changes via cryogenic treatments.

jn

[mark funk]

 


                                                                                                                               

[mjosef]

This Cryo Treatment just doesn't sit easy with me. Let's talk about it 

Why would anyone want to take an engineered piece of audio equipment like a vacuum tube and dump it into a 300 degree below zero solution?

Cuz, it sounds 'better', to my ears.
SImple and cheap to hear for yourself, buy two pairs of any new issue tube(small signal tubes like Tungsol 12ax7), one pair cryoed one pair not. TS 12ax7 are pretty cheap, around $18. ea. (cryoed ones are $19. @ Cryoset). Listen to the non cryoed pair first, allowing for break-in time. Popping in the cryoed pair (even with zero hours) should reveal all the info you need.

On things subjective, talk can be .... just talk. 

[FullRangeMan]

If you buy tubes from Russia chances are they already cryo treated for free.
As military tubes living decades stored in cold Siberia wharehouses -50ºC this winter

[Ethan Winer]

There is easily to acertain proof that cryogenic treatment can increase hardness and reduce physical frictional wear in metals

Sure, but what actually matters is if the audio circuits are improved and by how much. This is easy to tell via the standard metrics for fidelity: frequency response, distortion, and noise. So again, why don't cryo vendors ever show such evidence?

--Ethan

[srb]

Sure, but what actually matters is if the audio circuits are improved and by how much. This is easy to tell via the standard metrics for fidelity: frequency response, distortion, and noise. So again, why don't cryo vendors ever show such evidence?

My answer:  because it has no effect on frequency response, distortion and noise.

Cryo-enthusiast answer:  because there are other metrics contributing to the sound that have not yet been discovered and are not yet understood.  Those are the ones that cryo treatment affects!   


Steve

[Ethan Winer]

there are other metrics contributing to the sound that have not yet been discovered and are not yet understood.

I assume that's a joke? If not, you need to understand null testing, which subtracts the input and output signals to see how they differ. The beauty of a null test is it reveals all differences, including those you might not think to look for. Nulling has been around since the 1940s:

Hewlett-Packard Distortion Analyzer

So if there really were some as yet-unknown property of audio, it would have been revealed 50 years ago.

This is easy enough to test with cryo'ing. Take two identical signal wires and cryo one of them. Then send the same signal through both and null what comes out the other ends. To be sure the test is valid, you could null them before cryo'ing as well as after. If you get a complete null both times, that proves cryo'ing is a sham. And if they're different, that's exactly the proof cryo proponents need!

As I said, there's a reason cryo vendors never show proof. 

--Ethan

[Letitroll98]

I've never had any cryo'd  components in my system because, mainly I just don't care enough to be bothered.  But that doesn't mean I dismiss it's benefits out of hand without listening.  SotA science as of this date cannot confirm either the standard model or the structure of the universe and there are people on this forum telling you they know everything there is to know about the electromagnetic force and how it interacts with our daily lives, and they are considered normal.  They are stark raving mad.

[neekomax]

I've never had any cryo'd  components in my system because, mainly I just don't care enough to be bothered.  But that doesn't mean I dismiss it's benefits out of hand without listening.  SotA science as of this date cannot confirm either the standard model or the structure of the universe and there are people on this forum telling you they know everything there is to know about the electromagnetic force and how it interacts with our daily lives, and they are considered normal.  They are stark raving mad.

Just because one doesn't, and cannot, know everything, that does not mean that one doesn't know anything. The fact that there are some things that are yet to be known does not, in my opinion, invalidate the things that are known.

(Sorry if that was redundant.)

Point is, I'm pretty sure that the nature of sound waves and their properties as they relate to human perception is well understood by modern science, even if the Grand Unification Theory still eludes us.

[Letitroll98]

Just because one doesn't, and cannot, know everything, that does not mean that one doesn't know anything. The fact that there are some things that are yet to be known does not, in my opinion, invalidate the things that are known.

What it does do is eliminate the possibility of absolute certainty.  If you cannot describe the complete system, the best you can do is make educated guesses on the outcome.  Because electrical theory predicts the behavior of circuits, some here say it is fact.  Newtonian physics does quite well for sending rocket ships to Mars, but when you need to apply it to something more critical, like the orbit of Mercury, it breaks down.  Now I'm not equating predicting the orbit of Mercury with cryo'd audio parts, only that there is a significant percentage of possibility that there may be things going on in audio reproduction not described in the textbooks and super-cooling conducting metals could very well be one of those things.  Enough doubt that I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but then again I don't care all that much about it, I'm presently testing different amps and changing speaker orientation, no time for cryo'd parts for awhile.

[Ethan Winer]

If you cannot describe the complete system, the best you can do is make educated guesses on the outcome.

You seem to be confusing knowing how the entire universe works versus knowing how audio works. Audio is an infinitesimal subset of the universe, and I assure you it's fully understood by knowledgeable audio engineers. What is still being researched is psychoacoustics, perception, ear-brain interaction, and so forth. But even that is very well understood. For example, we know exactly why people believe they hear things that don't really exist, such as the imagined improvement after cryo-ing wires or a power supply.

Sticking with the topic, as I already explained, a null test reveals all differences including those you might not be looking for. So that immediately disproves - with 100 percent certainty - the notion that "there are other metrics contributing to the sound that have not yet been discovered and are not yet understood." Once you understand this, and why it's proof positive, all the rest falls into place.

--Ethan

[Letitroll98]

You seem to be confusing knowing how the entire universe works versus knowing how audio works. Audio is an infinitesimal subset of the universe, and I assure you it's fully understood by knowledgeable audio engineers.

That's exactly the problem.  You see it as "an infinitesimal subset of the universe" when there is absolutely no way that this can be so.  Please explain how you can completely segregate any part of the universe from another.  Especially areas that are intimately linked to the electro-weak force.  Now of course electrical theory is very good at predicting circuit behavior in virtually all normal conditions, but it is irresponsible when presented with unexplained phenomena to dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't fit your theory (I know it's not yours, but the one you are using).  And a null result is not confirmation or repudiation, it's a null result, it means you didn't find anything.  A null result can only suggest, not confirm.

None of this means I support any cryogenic procedure.  Only that there appears to be solid evidence that molecular changes do take place, thus it should be an area of open inquiry rather than dismissed and ridiculed.     

[*Scotty*]

Here is a link to an explanation of null testing at DIY audio
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/everything-else/13415-null-difference-testing.html
A null test of an electronic component, say a preamp, would involve subtracting the gain matched output of the preamp from the signal present at the input and examining the difference. Any deviation of the output  from signal that was present at input is revealed. There is no where for difference between the two signals to hide.
Scotty