Kieran Downes

This paper explores how passion and enthusiasm among users can impact the path of a technological artifact by following the vacuum tube from its commercial demise in the 1960s through its resurgence in the world of high-end audio from the early 1970s to the present.  Though vacuum tube technology helped launch a wide range of industrial and commercial technologies in the first half of the 20th century, the invention and eventual mass production of affordable and efficient solid-state transistors made tubes largely obsolete in most applications by the late 1960s.  Compared with transistors, tubes were expensive, prone to failure, inefficient, and produced substantial amounts of waste heat.  In spite of these drawbacks, in the early 1970s high-end audio enthusiasts developed a renewed interest tube-based audio amplification systems because of their superior sound quality, sparking a tube renaissance that spread throughout the high-end industry.  The veneration of the “tube sound” among high-end audio enthusiasts has played a significant role in keeping this otherwise outmoded technology alive, and has pushed vacuum tube technology into new areas that continue to change and expand.  This paper aims to show how, in the case of the high-end community and its relationship to vacuum tubes, enthusiasm and passion for aesthetic qualities can have specific technological outcomes that defy commonplace assumptions about the superiority of technologies that are, on the surface, better, faster and cheaper.