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An amp is a tool to amplify the electronic signal. As long as it's designed properly, there are very little differences between amps. The tone comes mostly from the player and the instrument. If you are finding yourself splitting hairs between a $1000 amp and a $2000 amp, probably your technique needs work and you are trying to substitute or fix your average tone by spending lots of money on amplifiers. There is no magic fix. You have to practice consistently and hard. There is a youtube video comparing a fender tube amp and a wal mart solid state amp. They both sound fine. As a jazz guitar player I see no reason to use tube amps as their primary advantage is the warm overdrive they produce which is good for blues, country, and rock music. In jazz you want the opposite, you want more headroom and less distortion. It makes zero sense to use a tube amp for jazz, which is also a lot heavier, ten times the price in some cases, and prone to break down every year. I prefer a Roland Cube 60D, which I picked up for $100 on ebay. It is more than adequate, clean, crisp, quiet, relatively light weight, has an acoustic setting, perfect for practicing and lessons and the small gig. I really think with this amp you get the most for your money. A Roland 40x would even been good, weighing only 19 lbs with a 10" speaker. If you wanted to spend a lot more you could buy a quilter 8" combo with a 12" extension cab, which is lightweight, comes in two pieces (19 lbs and 35 lbs) and gives you 200 watts of power. However, with jazz, you usually cant take advantage of these volumes because the hollowbodies feedback at low volumes. The quilter costs around $1000-$1500. Why spend so much when you can get a Roland for $100-$200 ? I know this sounds ridiculous, but you could pick up something like a Rivera fender solid stage lead 100 watt from the 80's for $100, put a neo speaker in it and have a very nice sounding jazz amp for $200. I don't believe all the hype with tubes. They are slightly nicer than solid state, but not worth the money, the weight, the upkeep and all. If you play blues, yeah you must have a tube amp. but we're talking jazz... What really cracks me up is these guys who buy expensive tube amps and then run the tube screamer thru it because STV used it. If you have tubes, you want to overdrive them for your tone, not derive it from a pedal. Pedals were designed for use with solid state amps that you couldn't overdrive. So why buy a $1000 vintage Fender Deluxe then use a stupid $100 pedal to get your tone. Doesn't make sense.
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06-05-2014 01:20 PM
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I plug in... and if I like the sound... I take it. I really don't care how it gets where it does. Wait... I take that back... I do care about reliability and serviceability. For a kick around the house amp, I don't much care what it is. But if I were to ever play professionally again, I would probably want something I could easily have serviced anywhere.
For that, it would probably be a small, ptp tube amp with a simple layout. Not because I think it sounds better (although I wouldn't be buying a tube amp I think sounds like garbage) but just because I can take it virtually anywhere.
The chances of me every trying to make a living at music again are very low to even nil. I just like playing around the house. So... I am pretty easy to please.
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I don't agree that there is very little difference between properly designed amps. There is not just one jazz guitar sound; it does not simply involve cleanly amplifying a signal. Charlie Christian, Hand Garland and Kenny Burrell have all used different types of tube overdrive for a variety of excellent sounds.
I find that an ultra-clean amplification that sounds beautiful in my living room can sound thin when I play with others. I find that a warm overdrive, which might be really evident and even slightly ugly in my living room, is often canceled out when I play with others and creates the perception of a robust clean tone. I don't mind getting that overdrive from tube or solid state, so long as it gets me there. At the end of the day, I'm still going for a clean tone.
I also don't agree that pedals were designed for solid state amps you could not overdrive. I would say that most overdrive pedals, including tube screamers, are designed specifically to complement tube overdrive. Personally, I might not be interested in replacing the sound of a Deluxe Reverb with a $100 effect. However, there are many effects that boost the input into the amp in a certain way that creates a very pleasing sound to some. The old Echoplex is a prime example.
I do agree that technique is the bottom line, but there are many ways to skin a cat.
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i have a couple of tube amps, but just one solid state one, a jc77, so i'll have to limit my opinions to that, which is part of the reason for the thread. i figure you lovely gents have some thoughts on the matter but here are mine:
i can nail (or approximate) most of the sounds in my tube amps (mainly a vox and a fenderesque pile of tubes) with my dumb old jc77. careful eq'ing, a pedal here and there, and... yeah, close enough. the real difference to me, is in the feel. there's a depth to the tubes that the solid state just doesn't have. it sounds the same, but it doesn't feel the same. its just... there. its like comparing water flowing around you to a brick in the face.
so... how does that relate to archtops and acoustic guitars? i notice that solid state is awful popular with acoustic and jazz players. and through limited testing, my floater acoustic sounded pretty nice with solid state amps. then again, it sounds pretty great through the tubes, also (which i wasn't expecting). perhaps even better, but not so much so that i'd demand a tube amp at all times. i haven't tried my flattops through the tubes yet, but they all have different types of pickups and once you factor that in, and various acoustic preamps/di/wonder boxes, which is a different can of worms.
so do my findings regarding the feel of solid state amps hold for new and current ones as well? and why don't we see many tube amps for acoustics (logistics aside)? and is what's good for the archtop good for the flat top?
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Tubes are just cooler.
Have you tried a Quilter? Many here find them "tube-like." Then there are the modeling systems ..
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Tube amps are generally more expensive to buy, easy and generally inexpensively fixed, have maintenance issues, most sound or can be made to sound good, all the opposite of many SS amps which are "generally" less expensive to buy, not easily or inexpensively repaired, require little or no maintenance, GENERALLY last long without issues and the sound is the sound without pedals.
I don't repair many amps any more but when I did I wound up working only on tube amps.
Spending a lot of time on an SS amp only to have the owner squeal about the cost of my time and labor is a losing proposition. I heard this more than once... "It's going to cost 2 hours labor for a $200 amp?" :-)
OTOH, someone invested in a nice tube amp is a totally different consumer, a two hour labor fee of $90 isn't going to cause a blood vessel to burst. Add to that many common problems can be isolated and repaired in less than an hour.
I "generally" consider most SS amps disposable, not so for tube amps.
So... "tubes vs solid state- some thoughts (not "which is better?") is a loaded question if you take the plus and minus aspect into consideration and open for interpretation.
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So my current primary tube amp is a clone of a tweed Deluxe 5E3, a famously warm, fat, mids-forward amp. I've had it a few years now, having built it from a kit. It's small, light, portable and sounds great. But like all tweed amps, it's not exactly clean. There's a bit of throatiness even at pretty low volumes and much more so as it gets turned up. Since I play jazz in a small combo, it never gets turned up past 3- plenty loud, even a bit too loud, at that level.
I have a Roland Cube 60 which sounds great until you put it side-by-side with the 5E3, which reveals a bit of thinness and sterility to the Cube's tone. But I've played many gigs with it without feeling short-changed.
My main SS amp is an AI Clarus 2r Series III. It's a head that I run through a Raezer's Edge Stealth 12. I had tended to think of that amp as loud, clean and lacking warmth or smokiness. Played many gigs with that setup, people always said it sounded great but I was always a little "meh." Just last week I pulled it out for the first time in a long time, sat it next to the 5E3 and compared them. I was amazed at how warm and fat the Clarus sounded! It's cleaner than the 5E3 to be sure, but it's not less jazzy or warm (whether than means the same thing to anyone else, who knows). I used it for my last gig and was quite pleased except it was a bit harder to hear myself and judge the balance with the band- the cab is much more directional than my open-backed 5E3. Probably should have gotten it up off the floor.
One thing I have learned with this amp is to run the master volume fairly up (2:00) and use the channel's gain control to set the volume. That seems to warm and fatten the sound up quite a bit. The end result is that I am going to be using my SS amp more often.
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Do you consider Evans, Acoustic Image, Hendricksen and Mambo disposable? I, personally, would much rather play through a clean SS amp that I can pick up than a pile of tubes that I can't even lift into the back of my SUV. I just don't care for the sound of tube amps in general and to have to put up with expensive tube changes and then have them go microphonic on a regular basis is just not my cup of tea. I've never had a failure in 30+ years of using SS amps (Polytone, Cubes, G&K MB200, AI, Evans, and Webb) but had plenty of problems with Super Reverbs and Twins. Just my $.02
Originally Posted by GNAPPI
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I have a couple tube amps and micro "lunchbox" (orange) that is technically a hybrid. I love my tube amps but that silly little orange micro-terror got me intriqued, it sounds decent although I wish it had an effect loop. So I recently tried sending the pre-out of one of my tube amps into a Crown D75 and on to one of my 1-12 cabinets and it sounded pretty damn good. Now I'm thinking about finding or building a tube pre and running it through a 1 RU SS power amp, I'm pretty sure that weight wise I would still be way ahead of almost any 15-30w combo.
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The one feature the solids have is a headphone jack.....so important for daily use.....would like to try a Princeton, but I would end up playing it once a week.....when nobody is around to annoy them...
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I admit solid state amps have many advantages, but I am Old school and love the sweet spot on tube amps. I have both but two are Tube and one Solid state for playing at home late at night with headphones
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For playing clean I'm equally happy with the tone of either tube or SS amps if they're good amps. More important than tubes vs. solid state is the design of their tone control/EQ system and the speaker/cabinet they are going through.
When I go from a tube to solid state amp, seems like I need about 3 times the rated power output to have the same amount of "muscle" in a large room. But solid state power is cheap these days.
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My Blues Cube definitely doesn't feel (and sound) like a Jazz Chorus. Both are SS amps made by the same manufacturer (Roland). Originally Posted by feet
Last edited by Fidelcaster; 02-06-2017 at 05:11 AM.
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For a clean sound, we can generally disregard the tube power amp as relevant - so it all comes down to preamp and cab / speaker, this is where most of the difference from a tube amp (say Fender) and a solid state amp (say "jazz amp") is. The thing about the Roland is it has a Fenderish preamp (it's quite easy to "convert" a tone stack from tube to preamp) and an open-back cab, so it comes much closer to a regular tube amp. I would say the main difference would still be in the speakers.
If you play a solid state amp with the correct preamp trough an open-back cab with some Jensens and a good reverb, it will sound like a tube amp. I've done this with a Jazzmaster Ultralight head (fender tone stack) and a Mambo head (flat) with a Barb EQ pedal (fender tone stack). Works like a charm!
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Which is better is entirely personal, as is being demonstrated here. And depends on context ... what is your mission, how best to accomplish it.
I've owned four SS amps (Fender London reverb head, Quilter Aviator head and the little 101, and a Lab Series L3). Plugged into many others. To me, feel and sound are not totally separate things. It's one experience. SS amps definitely intrigue me - especially some of the higher end choices mentioned here. But I doubt they'll ever replace tube amps as my preference. The feel is very different, and even the best SS amp sound (to me) has so far not equaled the depth and warmth of tubes. And I hear and feel the difference in cleans too. A certain dimension in the tube sound ... SS sounds/feels flatter somehow. When volume comes up and edge comes in, SS gets much closer. The Lab L3 excelled in that department. Very tube-like drive.
MD
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What Jorge said.
In fact, there are so many things to say about this subject.... and so many myths too
to me, all other things being equal, i would say that the main differences between tubes and transistors is in the power amp. the preamp with or without tubes will sound 95% the same (some transistor based pedals recreated the preamp of known tube amps with success). But the power amp in a tube amplifier has this specificity: when you play loud and hit a chord hard, you will need a lof of current to amplify that, and it will 'deplete' your circuit of the good voltage for a moment, smoothing out the attack until the transformer and rectifier level things out. That will make the tube amp slower in attack, and some people (bluesmen) love that. Some other people (jazzmen, metalheads) prefer to have a much more precie and crisp attack. in that situtation, a transistor based power amp will probably be a better choice.
But a big part of the tube vs transistor story comes down to this:
tube technology is expensive, tubes are expensive, transformers are expensive, you need at least 2 - 3 of them, it's high voltage, ... With an expensive amp, you will put a decent or good speaker, and build a good cab.
WHen transistors arrived, it was the opportunity to bring amps to everyone because you don't need transformers, ranstors are cheap, ... so they made ... cheap amps, with cheap loudpseakers, cheap wood, cheap circuits, and it sounded ... cheap
Even in the original post, the comparison is between normal tube amps and cheap transistor amps.. a 200$ transistor amp costs .. how much to build? after the margin of the seller, of the importator, transport, stocking, building it, ... 50$ worth of hardware.. in that, nothing is of good quality.
So my point of view is that if you put a well designed transistor circuit in a good cab with a good speaker, you will get sounds as similar as you want to tube amps (you can even have saturation if you want to.. or 100% clean) at the exception of the attack that will probably be faster and more precise than most tube amps have ... except you design something to simulate that 'sag', like the mood lab 5 series amp did with a limiter.
That's why evans amps sound remarkably similar to a twin. and why some transistor amps have made a name for themselves.
And behind all that, some companies have a big interest to keep the 'tubes are better' myth alive..
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Arnaud, you explained it better than me. When I said the power amp was irrelevant I said that from a sonic perspective. It does matter in terms of feel, and funny enough I much prefer an SS power amp, much faster attack. I don't really like the slow attack of tube power amps, in fact, I could use power amp emulation in my modelling rig and choose not too
Last edited by jorgemg1984; 02-06-2017 at 10:18 AM.
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Of course archtops with magnetic pickups sound good with tubes. I concur with what was said above about the difference in attack and sustain with the tubes.
For piezos though I don't think tubes cut it. That's where a good SS acoustic amp comes in, preferably with a tweeter whose level can be adjusted (to get rid of squonk) and a midrange filter and phase adjuster (to get rid of feedback). Most of my guitars sound really good through my Fishman Artist, though admittedly the Tele prefers a Fender tube amp.
For gigging the Artist gets the call, given its light weight and versatility.
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You might want to take a look at this. Vacuum Tubes versus Solid-State Transistors Originally Posted by jorgemg1984
Arnaud, you explained it better than me. When I said the power amp was irrelevant I said that from a sonic perspective. It does matter in terms of feel, and funny enough I much prefer an SS power amp, much faster attack. I don't really like the slow attack of tube power amps, in fact, I could use power amp emulation in my modelling rig and choose not too
It partly refutes the idea that solid state amps are "faster" than tube amps. It explains that tube amp circuits have less latency (at least according to this summary of the research up to that point) and respond faster to changes in input than transistor amp circuits. I think what you are talking about in terms of response and feel a) is part of the sound, so I wouldn't draw the distinction between sound and feel; and b)is more a function of power-supply sag that comes from tube rectifiers (i.e., a tube amp with a beefy power supply and SS rectifier doesn't sag).
It also states that the area where there is the greatest difference between the performance of tubes and transistors is in electro-mechanical interfaces (e.g., pickup-> pre-amp and power-amp-> speaker), which contradicts the idea that only pre-amps matter at low distortion levels. In any circuit there is always some distortion, and transistors and tubes have different distortion characteristics, particularly in the way they emphasize harmonics, particularly when the signal comes from an electro-magnetic pickup and goes into a speaker.
That's not to say one is better than the other, but the differences are real and are found in all stages of circuits.
John
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I find Piezos sound great with tube amps or solid state. The main thing is how clean and accurate the amp is and the quality of the speaker to go with it.
I like my tube Fender and Ampeg amps and solid state Yamaha G series amps, any instrument I have can get a good sound on any of those amps.
My funniest amp is a old Randall Rg120 115 , one channel is a great mellow jazz sound and the other is very tube like hard rock. 2 very different sounds, the jazz clean doesn't really go with hard rock and vice a versa. It would be perfect for touring with a rock,blues or rocking country act and sneaking in Jazz club gigs on nights off. The perfect amp if you don't know if you'll be rocking out or going mellow.
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Music is very subjective to all of us there really is no right or wrong answer.
Solid States Amps are lighter, can take more abuse and cost less. These days the sound the tones are pretty close. Tube amps are more costly and cost more to maintain. Heavier but have a warm sound IMHO. Find the sound or your style of playing.
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John,
Thanks for your article, I will read it asap it looks very interesting.
Actually i think we're saying the same exact things:
The 'slower' attack of tube amps i described was the result of the voltage depression caused by a tube rectifier. However, i have heard (not tested it myself) that it could also be due to too weak power transformers (have you tried to replace a deluxe reveb stock transformer with high quality ones like mercury magnetics? it's a completely different amp! tone wise, but also on the attack .. so i think that i also plays a role in that. which means that to avoid a slow attack you need to have both a solid state rectifier (which is cheap and easy to get, but also a high quality power transformer, which is NOT cheap, not necessarly stock in most amps, and HEAVY).
So i can agree with the idea that theoretically tubes are faster, but in practice, i think that except for really top tier amps with huge power transformers, that might not be the case (it's all based on reasoning and some collected informations, so please let me know if i'm wrong of course).
Also, your article says that the "greatest difference between the performance of tubes and transistors is in electro-mechanical interfaces (e.g., pickup-> pre-amp and power-amp-> speaker". which was exactly my point: if you compare a transistor amp with a crappy-everything-including-speaker to a medium/high end tube amp .. most of the tone differences will be due to everything but the actual preamp/power amp (with comparable preamps of course).
I fully agree that there will be differences between a tube power amp and a transistor one, or a tube preamp or a replica of it, using transistors... of course, since these are different technologies.
But i also think that the tonal differences coming from these differences actually are small compared to the differences induced by a different speaker, transformer, pick, pickup, construction of the cab, etc..
By the way with the preamp tube going all over the place in .... every type of spec that can be measured ... gain of a working preamp tube can be between 60 to 140, and so can be all theit different measurable specs, plus the asymetry between the two sides of the phase inverter, .. So for me even changing your preamp tubes will have a bigger effect on your sound that the harmonics generated from tubes or transistors...
but again i can be wrong..
everytime i'm making an experiment, i get to the conclusion that the factor i'm playing with has such a huge factor on the sound.. at least .. 50% of changing your sound comes down to changing your speakers. and another 50% to changing your preamp tubes and another 50% from your strings, your pick, your transformers, your pickup height, your cable quality, the tone stack type and values, ..
it's such a complex system and every factor has an impact, in a different way. it's easy to get lost
Originally Posted by John A.
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The two technical articles discussed in your link are good ones. I'm a former electrical engineer, and I might still have a copy of that IEEE magazine in my attic. Originally Posted by John A.
That 1973 AES article is new to me. One takeaway for me is that when a tube amp is in the early stages of distortion (before it reaches clipping) it won't be perceived as distorted, but just more full. What you hear is less accurate (from a hi-fi reproduction viewpoint) but can be more pleasing. But solid state amp designs have improved since 1973 while tube production quality has gone down, so results of that study might be a bit different if repeated today.
Last edited by KirkP; 02-08-2017 at 12:44 PM.
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The physics of why valve amps sound better | TechRadar
I don't necessarily agree with the proposition but interesting research.
peejay
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That's assuming valve (tube) amps sound better. I personally prefer SS over tube, so a player's perception of 'sound better' enters into the equation which makes the whole thing subjective and open to endless arguments. Does my Telecaster sound better than your ES175 or does your L5 sound better than my Telecaster? To me, the answer is "yes" and "no"......but you may disagree for various reasons. 'Good', 'better', and 'best' are immeasurable and subject to opinion. YMMV Originally Posted by peejay
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