Comment by JKCalhoun
10 hours ago
"I don’t think I’ve noticed the flicker…"
Well… (Sorry, let me put my tinfoil hat on.) Yeah, well that noticed part is what is worrisome to me. I do worry that there is some effect on our brains even though we might not perceive the flicker.
As an analogy, I got into those supposedly audiophile "Class D" (or "Class T") amplifiers over a decade ago. Every day I turned on the music in my office and coded with the T-amp playing. I would have told you at the time that, indeed, it sounded amazing.
Some time later I built a tube amplifier (The Darling [2], in case anyone cares—I've since built perhaps a dozen more).
When I brought it into the office and swapped it out for the T-amp, the change was sublime but immediately noticeable. I hate to fall back on audiophile terminology but it's the best I have for the experience: I was suddenly aware of "listening fatigue" that had been a component of the T-amp. I hadn't even known it had been fatiguing until I heard the tube amp in its place for days on end.
With the loss of color fidelity and the flickering issue, I'm embarrassed to say that incandescent is starting to look good to me again.
I might, as an experiment, replace only those lights that we turn on in the evening when we are relaxing, reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-T_amplifier
[2] https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/darling-1626-amp.... and https://imgur.com/gallery/oh-darling-tube-amplifier-Lq2Sx
If the LED has good DC conversion it should not flicker at all, the flow across the diode would be constant. Just buy good LEDs, incandescent light has many drawbacks.
This is a really interesting comparison, but a flawed analogy. (I’m absolutely not challenging your preference for tube amps.)
LEDs clearly do not produce anything like the spectral energy of blackbody radiation (sunlight, incandescence bulbs), and many do flicker (although that’s a byproduct of individual designs, not the technology itself). This is easy to confirm with simple sensors. So it’s completely uncontroversial to say they don’t replicate “natural” light.
Pretty much all tube amp designs produce an output that is modified from the input signal. This is what makes them sound different and to plenty of personal opinions more enjoyable to listen to music on. But they are more like the “LED” side of the lighting example - they produce an output that is different from the “natural” aka original audio material.