Old Radios

Well, yesterday it looked like spring was here to stay, and today I woke up to sleet bouncing off the sidewalks.  Go figure.  So I bring you a cozy scene appropriate for this brisk evening: a duck comfortably ensconced in his study, bathed in the warm glow and sonorous tones of an old, vacuum-tube radio.  To be honest, this drawing is a little more off-kilter than I was planning on, but sometimes tired muscles act of their own accord, with little regard for right angles.  Perhaps my subconscious is back on a Chagall kick.  But back to the old radios.  Compared to transistors, vacuum tubes are fragile and terribly inefficient.  They are shorter lived and usually more expensive to replace (at least nowadays).  But oh, the sound!  To this day, guitarists prize tube guitar amplifiers over solid-state ones for their superior tone, for the smooth, "organic" way they break up into distortion when pushing their tubes outside of the specified operating parameters.  And vacuum tubes seem to me the last link between the visible mechanical world and the theoretical electronic one.  You can't see electrons bouncing around inside a vacuum tube any more than you can see them inside a transistor.  But you can imagine them.  You can see the plates, the grids, the screens, the filaments that heat the tubes.  It's all on display inside the glass.  And you can fathom just how it all works, even though electrons are invisible to the human eye.  I like the way a vacuum tube device doesn't just turn on, lickety-split.  It takes its time as the tubes warm up and begin to glow a soothing orange-yellow.  Listening to the radio becomes a ritual.  And relaxation in a cozy room at the end of a long, cold day is an important ritual indeed.