Tube VS. Solidstate

[Dave Mudgett]

There's lots of info about the history of tube guitar amps, but not so much about solid-state guitar amps. This short timeline on the solid-state guitar amp forum is interesting - Click Here.

Note that Dan Pearce, developer of the Pearce amps, was also in on the design of the Norlin/Moog Lab-Series amps. Both are highly touted for their warmer-than-usual solid-state sound. I believe these were FET designs, but hardly the only FET amps out there.

That 1972 tube-vs-solid-state article is very interesting. I agree that the typical explanation of "tubes emphasize even-order harmonics" is very over-simplified. Every aspect of the design affects things - the generally softer and frequently asymmetrical clipping of the tube circuits is really quite different. I have to wonder if some of the better-sounding solid-state FET amps didn't use some asymmetrical clipping like this. If I want sweeter harmonics in a tube amp, I don't want tubes matched up too exactly.

[John Billings]

"Dan Pearce, developer of the Pearce amps, was also in on the design of the Norlin/Moog Lab-Series amps. "

That's very interesting Dave! They're all tied together.

[Tommy Shown]

I notice that tube amps are once again becoming revered by guitarists.

Well I gotta say that tube amps never stopped being revered by guitarists. It's been pretty hard to find a non-tube amp on stage with a guitar player ever since I was born. With steel players, there does seem to be a revival. I see a lot more guys cleaning up their old Twins and getting them out there and remembering what great steel guitar tone is all about. All the great recordings of the great steel guitar works thru history were made almost entirely thru tube amps. Except for just a few, tubes have ruled the tone world even for steel. The transistor thing has come out of the practicality of having lots of clean power and at a reasonable weight and also low maintenance. I've always felt it was a trade-off for utility over tone. There are some nice and clean sounding transistor amps, many were the discrete designs from the '70s such as the early Peavey steel amps, the early Evans, Webb, Sho-Bud...

But when it comes to the golden era of beautiful sounding steel guitar tone, vintage Buddy, most all Lloyd Green, classic Jimmy Day, Brumley, Jerry Byrd, Hughey, and the many other wonderful legends of the instrument, it was nearly entirely done with tubes.

And it's not just as simple as the even vs. odd ordered harmonics in the distortion, there's also a dynamic factor relating to how pick attack transients are treated and smoothed and sweetened by tubes. I'm a die hard tube amp guy (and I love this discussion/argument), but I've grown to thoroughly enjoy a hybrid setup with tubes mixed with transistor power amps. I never could play an entirely transistor setup. And I gotta admit, Buddy sure has some gorgeous sounding tones thru his all-transistor Peavey amps from back in the '70s. I guess when you have the "touch", you can make nearly anything sound good. I need all the help I can get.

Brad

I agree Brad, when I firsts started playing steel, all I heard was CLEAN.That meant the solid state transitor amps like the Nashville. But if one wants a warmer, killer tone, then the tube wins hands down. The amp I use is solid state but I use a pick up pre amp(aka Black Box)It has given me that warm killer tone of tube amp through a solid state amp.
This is an unsolicited comment. I have been spoiled by a using this product in a stereo steel set up and to me there is nothing like it.
Tommy Shown
SMFBTL

[Chase Swan]

I'm a tube fan myself. I think they are a lot warmer and sonicly pleasing.

My personal experience with solid state has been that with a band they don't cut through the mix very well... as soon as the drums and bass kick in I just disappear.

BUT I do think they are much better for clean tones and their reliability is hard to beat.

Why not get the best of both worlds and run your steel through an A/B?

[Jesse Leite]

It's interesting to hear everyone's opinions on the matter. I myself am a tube fan, but I can see how you would get a cleaner sound out of most solid state amps.

I think my biggest gripe about solidstate (for 6 string guitar anyway) is that I don't like how most solid state amps sound when pushed with a distortion pedal in front of the amp. I love how smooth a TS-808 is through a tube amp. In my opinion, it's one of the smoothest sounding overdrive boxes out there. Yet, through most solidstate amps, even the TS-808 sounds too fuzzy for me. Maybe it has something to do with odd/even harmonics, or maybe it has to do with how solidstate amps clip waveforms when pushed, or maybe it's way more involved than I could possibly understand. I do know that I can't stand most overdrive and distortion pedals through most solidstate amps.

...That's for 6 string electric guitar though. When playing my pedal steel I like having it super clean, and so I think I could really grow to like solidstate for steel playing; I think my friend Bent's Peavey Nashville amp sounds awesome. At this point though, I am really happy with the way my BMI sounds through my Peavey tube amp so I'll stick with it until I can at least learn how to play this thing

As far as solidstate amps go, anyone here plugging their steel into a keyboard amp? I have a Peavey KB2 as well, but it doesn't have any built-in reverb. Just curious if any keyboard amps are popular among the community here.

[J Fletcher]

Some keyboard amps I've encountered have a lowish input impedance, say 10 k ohms, which is too low for a steel, unless you have an active buffer between the guitar and the amp. Guitar amps usually have an input impedance of 1 meg ohms...Jerry

[Tommy Shown]

I love the sound, I have now. My ears don't ring after I have been playing.For years I have been wanting a warm rich tone that a steel is suppose to have. Now I got it. I don't know why solid state transistor amps were made, in the first place.
Tommy Shown

[Simon Stephenson]

I definately prefer the sound of tube amps for steel. But then I'm not really into all this clean headroom stuff. It might have something to do with the fat that I don't play pure country.

I think the sound of tube amps has much more complexity than just the distortion and frequency reponse. It also has a lot to do with the dynamic response to the signal. Also, I believe that it is the power amp section that is most important. I believe that amps with tube power amps and ss pre-amps sound more like an all-valve amp than ones with a tube pre-amp and ss power amp. Maybe it is due to the complex reaction between the power tube outputs and the speaker?

[Jesse Leite]

I agree with Simon about the power amp. I don't feel that tubes in the preamp of a solidstate amp really give it a tube feel. Maybe it warms up the sound a bit? I had a 100W Marshall Valvestate VS102R, and it had a 12AX7 in the preamp, yet it was a solidstate amp. That's where they get the name "Valvestate" I guess. Anyway, it didn't react anything like the tube amps I've played through. It also didn't need to warm up when I turned it on ...not that I don't like solidstate, but I still lean towards tube.

[Danny Hullihen]

Jesse, I've seen some after market "tube preamp" units and so-called "tube amplifiers" that barely had enough voltage going to the tube to light it up, let alone have enough voltage going to the plate to actually cause it to react like a tube. In these cases, (and if such is the case with your Marshall amp?,) it would easily explain why you didn't need to wait for it to "warm up," as it never will, and this would also easily explain why it didn't react like a tube. In essence, the filiment in the tube is "lighting up," but that's about it. The manufacturers called them "tube amps" simply because they had a tube or tubes in them. I called it "mental gymnastics!"

[RD Bennett]

As a guitarist I used to have a lot of tube gear. Now I have none. I went with modeling amps and plugins a long time ago, deciding that the 15-25% of tone I was missing wasn't worth the added upkeep and expense.

But nowadays, I find I am preferring flat-out solid state more and more. Over the summer I bought a '71 Acoustic 150 head for $50 off of Craigslist. I'm not saying this is normal for a solid state circuit, but I think this amp sounds about as warm, round, articulate and punchy as any vintage Fender head I ever owned. Better yet, it sounds good at every volume and likes every single pedal I have. Try that with a tube Fender.

Now I just want the same tone but in a modern, shoebox-sized package. Bassists have all these cool, tiny little SS amps, why can't we? I'll tell you why, the same reason why Americans can't have sensibly-sized cars-- someone in marketing thinks we don't want them. There ARE those of us who play guitar and maintain an open mind about transistors.

[Brad Sarno]

I've found that for "clean" sounds, a hybrid setup with tubes in the preamp and transistors in the power amp, that the preamp tubes truly have a great benefit. Clean loves preamp tubes. It's the reason that many or most of the vocal tracks on albums or CD's we've heard since the '50s, including today, were recorded with vacuum tube condenser microphones. It's also why many or most albums get mastered thru clean vacuum tube circuits. It's why many instrument tracks, especially bass guitar, were processed with vintage tube compressors. Many tracks are captured thru tube microphone preamplifiers. It's why many high end audiophiles listening to extremely clean sounds will prefer vacuum tubes in their preamps. Many bass players today prefer preamps with a tube stage.

Music Man has made many amplifiers with transistor preamps and tube power amps. I find that with those amps, the transistor preamp sounds fairly harsh and sterile, and not until you push the power tubes does the tone begin to gain that warm tube factor.

Clean loves preamp tubes. It helps enhance on a number of levels, some dealing with transient smoothing, subtle dynamic compression, 2nd order harmonic enhancement (warmth and fullness and sweeter treble), rich and dimensional midrange, etc.

And indeed beware of phony tube devices. Just because there's a tube in there doesn't mean it's really operating as a tube should. In fact, many or most modern "tube" preamp devices are actually cheap solid state circuits with a starved voltage tube in there to add bit of dirt along side the signal. Deceptive marketing and trash designs. Tubes need lots of volts to do their thing right.

For tones with true tube power amp drive, then obviously power tubes are the ticket. No modeling or simulation has yet mastered the real performance of a real tube run with real voltages. Maybe someday, but I sure haven't heard it yet. For clean, high-headroom instrument rigs, the tube preamp, solid state power amp hybrid setup still seems to come out on top. Of course I'm biased. Pun intended.

Brad

[RD Bennett]

Music Man has made many amplifiers with transistor preamps and tube power amps. I find that with those amps, the transistor preamp sounds fairly harsh and sterile, and not until you push the power tubes does the tone begin to gain that warm tube factor.

Brad, I disagree. I think MM's amps had some of the very best sounding cleans of their time, especially considering they were early master volume designs. "Harsh" is not a word that ever came to mind when I played through one (unlike most of the MV-era silverfaces!)... those amps were also very much like the benchmark Fender designs, just with a little less sparkle and a bit less sag in the low end.

As for audiophiles listening through tube gear, many audiophiles also still believe vinyl is somehow a more accurate and "hi-fi" listening experience than digital. (I still love vinyl too, but for very different reasons.) Tubes generate distortion. Distortion may be used for interesting coloration. That should be the domain of musicians, not consumers / end users of music; more accurate technologies now being available, tube amps no longer belong in the domain of home hi-fi, and most self-proclaimed audiophiles have far more money than brains. So it seems to me from 20 years of watching them yammer, anyway.

[Brad Sarno]

I agree that the audiophile market is full of those with more cash than brains, hence the pricing on some stuff. So I see why that may not necessarily be the best example. But the point I'd rather stress is that much of the recorded music that we listen to, and I mean very high end studio productions with the highest budgets in the world, major label releases, top artists, these production processes are FULL of gear using tubes because the tubes sound best in some places. The vocal microphones (and others), many compressors, many mic preamps, and also the mastering. Much of what we are listening to on the CD's we buy has had a major element of clean vacuum tube circuitry used for the sake of musicality, more enjoyable tone, and fidelity. It's been proven over and over that purely measurable ultra-low-distortion transistor designs are seldom the most musical and pleasing to the ear. Only in theory is that desirable, almost never in practice.

Even the 100% solid state audiophile is enjoying CD's that were likely created with plenty of musical tube enhancement. In fact, in a lot of cases, the final CD mastering is often passed thru one or two vacuum tube devices for putting the final touches on the resulting sound. I don't think people realize how much of what they hear has been enhanced by tubes.

And when it comes to steel guitar, I don't think it's really much of a contest. If one were to make a list of their top 10 favorite recorded steel guitar tones of all time, and including contemporary recordings, I bet that in at least 7 in 10 cases, tubes will have been involved.

Maybe a poll is in order.....?


Brad

[Earnest Bovine]

Brad,
Regardless of exactly what it is that tubes do, it seems to me that somebody should be smart enough to analyze it and emulate it in software. How well have the engineers done so far?

[David Mason]

One thing that hasn't been touched on here is that amp designs of the later 60's into even this century have been designed around the notion that a musician needed enough power to fill a club, with his own equipment. You needed a Twin Reverb or a 50w Marshall, back in my club days - and the steel would have need a 210w SS Peavey or the likes. The PA's were for vocals only.

Now the trend seems to be very much headed towards quiet stages, with the PA filling the rest of the room. I could definitely see using a smallish, rack-mount unit like Brad's SMS or Revelation, into something/somebody else's clean power, as long as it worked. There are guitarists playing Princetons on stage, but it's actually not that single 10" speaker that's peeling the paint.

[Brad Sarno]

Brad,
Regardless of exactly what it is that tubes do, it seems to me that somebody should be smart enough to analyze it and emulate it in software. How well have the engineers done so far?

I think that the amp modelers have really come a long way. Axe-FX, now Digidesign, Line-6, Boss/Roland, and others have done a pretty good job of emulating the sound of tube amplifiers distorting. What none of them have done is re-create the effect of a passive magnetic pickup driving the grid of a real tube. There's such complex interaction there where the inductive nature of the pickup and how that harmonically and dynamically interacts with the unique nature of a real tube, that I just don't see it yet. Nothing like the real thing. Once a pickup sees a transistor, it's all over, and digital modeling will be hard pressed to create something from nothing. So that particular instrument input level behavior, in my opinion, is still a real tube thing. Also, the clean tube preamp modeling that I've heard has fallen short of what a real tube preamp can do. I've heard the models, and while they capture the EQ voicing, and perhaps some of the subtle harmonic distortion that tubes exhibit, there's something missing, that I think only high voltage, good film capacitors, and real tubes can do. A/D and D/A digital conversion seems to be part of the problem too.

I've learned over the years that just because the technical measurement devices "say" that something should sound a certain way, there's truly nothing like the human ear to tell us the truth.

Brad

[Leslie Ehrlich]

for some reason SS works fine for Bass and Steel , but sounds wretched on guitar.

It depends on the amp. I've heard some wretched sounding tube amps too.

[Jesse Leite]

Cool discussion everyone.

I still see it this way: When it comes to cars, horsepower and performance can be gained in different ways. Back in the day displacement mattered. Having a V-8 engine with more volume meant more horsepower. Nowadays, people are taking little 4 cylinder cars and tuning them to be able to run at extremely high RPMs. That's another way to get horsepower. Bottom line is, they both perform... but they both handle different, sound different, and run different. You will never be able to emulate an old hopped up hot rod with a new off-shore rocket. They are just too different.

Maybe it's a cheesy analogy, but I cannot see anyone being able to emulate tubes perfectly using SS/transitor technology. They are just too different. Tubes process sound in a very physical way, and transistor amps process sound in a very electrical way; of course they will sound different! So, bottom line is trust your ears because it's all preference right?

I still prefer tubes for my stringed instruments though

[Lynn Oliver]

Once a pickup sees a transistor, it's all over...

Does this mean that you shouldn't use any pedals (other than perhaps a passive volume pedal) between the guitar and tube amp?

[John Billings]

A good friend is a well-known guitarist. He received the first Line 6 modeling amp before it went on the market. They wanted his comments. He thought the distorted and high gain sounds were kinda okay. He then brought the amp to me to evaluate the cleaner sounds. I play Teles and Strats, very clean, to a bit gritty. The amp just didn't do these sounds well at all. Very sterile and clangy, I guess I'd say. At that time, I was using my Dr. Z Prescription Combo with Bluebells, and the Line 6 wasn't even in the same city, much less the same ballpark. And it couldn't get close to any of my Fenders either.
I eventually bought the first version of the Pod. Traded it away after a few weeks. Same problem. Not good at emulating clean sounds. I do believe they've gotten a lot better with modeling, but,,,,,,,,,,,

[Brad Sarno]

Once a pickup sees a transistor, it's all over...

Does this mean that you shouldn't use any pedals (other than perhaps a passive volume pedal) between the guitar and tube amp?

Not exactly. I like to put a tube buffer first, or sometimes I like just a pot pedal before a tube amp. Either way, the pickup directly sees the tube as the first active device. With the tube buffer, you can place it first, and then send it thru all kinds of crap, pedals, effects, etc., but you've captured that pickup/tube interaction right out of the gate. I think there's a whole lot of tone goodness that happens right there.

Brad