What do you guys think about the fascination audio (and other electronic) equipment manufacturers appear to have with blue LEDs lately?
Just about every piece of electronic equipment I see these days seems to have a blue LED light on it somewhere, usually it's a pilot light, but sometimes it's totally non-functional, just there so it has a blue light on it. Granted blue LEDs were pretty rare a few years back, when they were new and expensive, but now they are almost as cheap as dirt and certainly no more expensive than any other color of LED. I would have thought the newness would have worn off by now.
At any rate, since virtually any color can be had in LEDs these days, why so much blue? Why not choose the color that looks best? I always thought my Creek 4330 amp would have looked much better if its power LED had been the same sort of blue-green color as the printing on its front panel rather than the plain green that it came with (blue-green LEDs may have been hard to come by back then, so I can forgive this).
I think that designers these days should at least make some attempt at being aesthetically pleasing rather than just using blue because some people still think it's "cool".
In my opinion, warmer colors like red and orange, go much better with audio equipment. I really don't see why anyone would want to use an icy cold, harsh, glaring and distracting blue LED on a vacuum tube amp. To quote some other post I saw somewhere, "blue LEDs and vacuum tubes go together like pickles and chocolate milk", in other words, not very well. I do have to admit that as long as they're not too bright, I prefer blue to green, yellow, or that REALLY ugly greenish-yellow they use for backlighting LCD displays on photo-copiers, laser printers and such.
I have about a dozen red-orange LEDs from HP, 615nm I think they are, that remind me of those old neon lamp pilot lights, and are darn near dead-ringers for the glow of vacuum tubes. If I buy the tube amp I have my eye on, the first thing I'll do is see if I can replace its green LED with one of my red-orange ones.
I'm sure it will sound much better, especially at night in a dark room. 
- Rick
(and yes, I know tubes can glow blue, too)
What do you guys think about the fascination audio (and other electronic) equipment manufacturers appear to have with blue LEDs lately?
Just about every piece of electronic equipment I see these days seems to have a blue LED light on it somewhere, usually it's a pilot light, but sometimes it's totally non-functional, just there so it has a blue light on it. Granted blue LEDs were pretty rare a few years back, when they were new and expensive, but now they are almost as cheap as dirt and certainly no more expensive than any other color of LED. I would have thought the newness would have worn off by now.
At any rate, since virtually any color can be had in LEDs these days, why so much blue? Why not choose the color that looks best? I always thought my Creek 4330 amp would have looked much better if its power LED had been the same sort of blue-green color as the printing on its front panel rather than the plain green that it came with (blue-green LEDs may have been hard to come by back then, so I can forgive this).
I think that designers these days should at least make some attempt at being aesthetically pleasing rather than just using blue because some people still think it's "cool".
In my opinion, warmer colors like red and orange, go much better with audio equipment. I really don't see why anyone would want to use an icy cold, harsh, glaring and distracting blue LED on a vacuum tube amp. To quote some other post I saw somewhere, "blue LEDs and vacuum tubes go together like pickles and chocolate milk", in other words, not very well. I do have to admit that as long as they're not too bright, I prefer blue to green, yellow, or that REALLY ugly greenish-yellow they use for backlighting LCD displays on photo-copiers, laser printers and such.
I have about a dozen red-orange LEDs from HP, 615nm I think they are, that remind me of those old neon lamp pilot lights, and are darn near dead-ringers for the glow of vacuum tubes. If I buy the tube amp I have my eye on, the first thing I'll do is see if I can replace its green LED with one of my red-orange ones.
I'm sure it will sound much better, especially at night in a dark room.
- Rick
(and yes, I know tubes can glow blue, too)