Tube Tone

I forgive you, TL. I was just down playing with the little booger in the basement a while ago. She's a hoot!
:D

neither are wrong or right, and saying one is "warmer" than the other is nonsense....try adjusting your gain and presence!

Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But have you noticed that practically every single amp company advertises their amps as sounding "tube-like". These guys aren't stupid, or deaf.

I read an article recently by a big executive from Fender. He said that the belief that tube amps have better tone than solid-states "wasn't even a question anymore".

Not saying there's anything wrong with solid states. Lots of Metal players prefer solid state amps because of the harder, edgy, clipping. You mentioned Randall. Look who plays Randall. They have gone out of their way to capture the Metal market. You aren't gonna see many (maybe a very few) Country players who want a big warm sound playing a Randall.

You may say they sound the same, practically everyone else disagrees. I do.

+1 for what Wes said. They do sound different.

yes they do, and to some it's a "better" different, while to others it's a "worse" sort of different.
my point is that you can't say one is better than the other...just different.

i was being overly general and mildly sarcastic in the suggestion that with a bit of dial adjustment you can get the same tone...obviously not.

We shouldn't forget that explaining sounds in words is extremely tough. Everyone knows what I mean with a cold beer but a 'cold tone' is much more vague. When you factor in that many people are from different parts of the world where different languages describe sounds in different ways we should not even hope to be able to agree on how a tube amp sounds.

I myself use both at the same time: a full 5W tube amp into a dummy-load into a clean 2x60W transistor amp. I would say that the 'warmth' of the sound comes from the tube amp but that's cool with me, I don't want the transistor amp to add more warmth, I want it to make it louder. Every technology has it's use, one way or the other, so we should all decide for ourselves what sound we like and how we can get that sound.

As for what the majority of people like: I couldn't care less. What good is playing an amp that everyone considers to be the best if I don't like it myself? Having said that Wes has the nasty habit of knowing perfectly well what he's talking about. Had I listened to him (and Joe) sooner I would have saved a nice ammount of money. For what that's worth.

Hi Ricochet
I am laying down on the floor due my statement about tube/solid state distorsion.
All my knowledge comes from the HiFi world (in the 70-80´is) as you can imagine.
Your technical explanation of distorsion in tubes is excellent for an old solid state HiFi amp designer as me.
Where have you got all that knowledge about tube amps ?
Tube amp design left the technical school agenda in the 60´ies.

But as you say, field-effect transistors (compared to bipolar) works very similar to tube amp and may have changed the education.

But one can only wonder about when the first guitar or PA amp with a digital class D high power amp will come. It should increase the efficiancy of the amp to > 90% compared to the 45-50% of a Class AB amp.
It will probably take a while in the guitar amp world as low current consumption is not a high priority parameter for a guitar amp buyer. But maybe in > 500 W PA amp world.

Kalle, I've been interested in tubes since I was 4 or 5 years old, and read everything I could get my hands on. I've got a pretty good collection of tube era electronics books and a few specialized tube books. But it took a lot of "reading between the lines" to figure out what they're doing under overdriven conditions, as the books generally just say "Don't overdrive them, or unacceptable distortion will result." The eye opener for me was a U.S. Military course on electronics written in the early 1950s that specifically explained that grid current in a resistance-capacitance coupled amp stage would cause a rise in the negative bias voltage and grid blocking. Later I realized that the same information could be found as far back as VanDerBuil's 1923 text, "Thermionic Vacuum Tube." It just hadn't sunk through my thick skull! Lots of other folks have figured it out the direct way, by hooking up voltmeters to the grids and oscilloscopes to the input and output. I've done that too, but it was confirmatory of theory.
:lol:

That 1950s military handbook on electronics, which is a good general introduction to tube circuits, has been reprinted and is for sale at: http://tubesandmore.com/

I am faschinated about all this "old" knowledge about the use of tube amps that is comming up in this discussion.
But my guess is that when the "vintage" guitar amps was designed in the fifties and sixties the designers didn´t had clue about what happends when overdriving a tube amp.
They just used standard design methods and the HW that was around.
And now 50 years later, designers of guitar amps are doing the everything they can to understand and emulate (in hw and sw) the behavior of these old and rather primitive designed "vintage" guitar amps.

Yep. Trying to understand and emulate what happened by accident. The original amp designers weren't intending their amps to be overdriven into distortion. They were working on the old standard audio designs developed for radio, and building them on the cheap. Lots of classic amp circuits and component values came straight out of the handbooks from the tube companies. Components were what the company could get the best price on.

My experience with tube amps ( 60-70's era champs and a 65 deluxe) is that they have more warmth at both clean and overdriven settings. I have played some tube amps that didn't sound very good (probably needed new tubes) and some transistor amps that sounded suprisingly good. However, to my ears, nothing beats tubes. Tubes seem to respond to your playing, whereas transistor amps seem more compressed, even at clean settings.

The funny thing is that I have a Chandler real tube overdrive pedal and a Ibanez Tube Screamer. The Chandler pedal sounds harsh wherease the tube screamer nails the tube sound. Go Figure.