The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #126

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    SS amps used to be quite different and easy to distinguish. Not so much now. And the room, the instrument, what is being played, and whether or not you're the one holding the guitar all matter. My Henriksen still sucks. My Fender Concert is still great. And the Roland Blues Cube Artist is somewhere in between. And sometimes I change EQ from what sounded good yesterday to make it sound good today. Whether or not that's real, marginal perception, or out-and-out fooling my ears is completely and totally irrelevant. Only the joy matters..

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  3. #127

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    Quote Originally Posted by jzucker
    I have heads and cabinets. 2 SS heads (quilter and dv mark) and two tube amp heads (morgan rca35r and fargen blackbird). The quilter and dv mark sound similar as do the morgan and fargen but the SS and tube amps sound *NOTHING* alike. NOT EVEN CLOSE!
    I am sitting here beside two amps that I routinely switch back and forth between, a 1970 early Silverface Deluxe Reverb, and a recent Henricksen Bud. I agree with you completely. The difference between the sounds of these two amps is obvious, with solid bodies, archtops, semi-hollow, flat vs round wound. After playing and enjoying the Bud for a while, its relative deadness becomes overbearing and I start to crave the transparency and sensitivity of the Deluxe, this all at low volumes.

    I find similar subtle differences between upper echelon solid state and tube stereo gear. Solid state always wins out with speed precision and clean-ness, also better bass slam and extension. But that is not what many people with good ears and broad taste in music listen for. Tubes provide transparency, timbre, completeness and involvement, which are more important than speed, precision and clean-ness. Modern SS gear is much improved, and approaches the best of what tubes offer, but tube electronics are also advancing and now offer full bass extension and virtually silent noise floors. There is good research demonstrating that people listening to SS electronics with digital sources suffer listener fatigue significantly sooner than people listening to tube electronics and vinyl.

    When I compare the DR to the Bud, I hear these classic differences between SS and tube stereo gear, although the Bud is a more advanced SS amp than the Deluxe is a tube amp.