The Steel Guitar Forum

Some say a tube amp will not produce the highs for steel properly. Thoughts ?

Give a listen to Charlie Pride’s “Live at Panther Hall” album. Lloyd playing thru a Fender Twin Reverb. Those highs are beautiful.

My opinion is that unless you' re overdriving or very close to overdriving, it's almost impossible to tell a tube amp from a solid-state amp. Either one, provided it's a good quality design, will reproduce frequencies that surpass what the human ear can hear.

Anyhow, it's the speaker that's usually the weakest link in the sound-chain.

This is the old "what is better". Tube or solid state. No right or wrong answer either way.

older players may not be able to hear the high frequencies coming out of a speaker, but they can certainly perceive the harmonics from those frequencies. Since that is the case, you might want to invest in tube equipment because solid state does not allow much of the harmonic content to come through.

Tubes for life!

At my gigs I prefer to drive a ford.

We need a "Like" button.
It is also rumored that the brand of beer, or type of drink that gets spilled on the amp affects the "tone", although that could be difficult to determine on an old amp that has been close to the edge of the bandstand for many gigs.

Tube or SS just dial her in🤠

Tube or SS just dial her in

If it were only that simple!

A quality "guitar" amp of any type - tube, solid state or digital - is capable of reproducing the full range of frequencies sent to the input by "guitars".

But there are inherent differences in how harmonic content is reproduced and the balance between even and odd order harmonics. some can be tweaked by the amp designer but only within certain parameters.

There are often significant difference in the ability to react to a player's dynamics at or near the top of the headroom (clean signal), and this is where tube vs solid state vs digital often becomes contentious - depending on the specific amps in question.

One issue is that it's much easier...and cheaper...to produce a medium to high-powered solid state amp than a tube one. Many "reasonably priced" solid state amps that are quite popular have fairly significant weaknesses that are overlooked because a "step up" could be quite costly. Many mid-priced SS amps become "standards" for that reason.

And many tube amps - especially vintage models - are poorly maintained, which can affect reliability. this can give them an unfair reputation as amps that "constantly break down" when the failure is on the part of the owner.

Regardless - you can find good ones for clean playing in both SS and tube. Digital is tougher, where mid-priced digital systems have specific problems with dropouts and cancellation that are not overcome until you hit a pretty high price point.

IMO forums are probably the worst place to get "information" about amplifiers. There is far too much coloration of "facts" based on personal preferences. It takes quite a bit of research time to get a fair comparison of various amps and types - and a decent technical background. Without it players are stuck with reading opinions and trying to determine who knows their stuff and who doesn't...and who is simply quoting "facts" from "my favorite amp" product advertising.

And then there are speakers -

Yikes.

Ken Metcalf wrote:At my gigs I prefer to drive a ford.

My 2002 Ford Explorer recently hit 100,000 miles.
Jim Sliff should be proud of me. I keep it well maintained!

I prefer tube amps, not because SS amp don't sound good but because I think they're cool. Going bwyone just reproducing sound, it's fascinating to me how they work. From a time gone by. I even use 2 mono tube power amps for my regular stereo at home.

I'm 40, and I was definitely born 30 years too late. So while you older folks might just view old tube amps as just old amps, I can't get enough of them.

I use a Fender Vibrosonic Reverb (the 135W one) with a JBL D130F usually. I also have a minty '69 Dual Showman Reverb with the 2x15 JBL cabinet. That one sounds fantastic. but not really movable.

I tell you what though, if I actually toured or anything like that, I'd be getting a NV1000 with a Neo magnet speaker. My Vibrosonic Reverb weighs about 90 lbs. It's real dense.

So are we lumping Class D amps in with SS? I have a couple of Session 400s and a Quilter Steelaire. Both are technically 'solid state', at least neither has tubes, but they are REALLY different.

For those that don't know what a Class D amp is, here's a bit of info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-D_amplifier

Some say a tube amp will not produce the highs for steel properly. Thoughts?

Depends on which "tube amp" you're talking about and what you mean by "properly". For me, the only issue is whether the overall sound is "good", however I decide what "good" is, and that is far from universally agreed upon.

To me and I believe a lot of guitar and steel players, the reference point of "good" clean tone is an old blackface Twin Reverb. Countless guitar amp designers have stood on their heads trying to replicate that clean sound with different types of designs, at higher volume levels, with more reliability, in a lighter package, and so on. Sort of like a black Emmons push-pull sort of became the de-facto standard of how pedal steels ought to look and sound (for a lot of people, anyway).

As has been stated, most solid-state designs are not fault-tolerant to being pushed close to the limits of linearity. They get very ugly when pushed unless a limiter is applied, as Peavey has very smartly done in many of their pedal steel amps. I especially like 70s Session/LTD 400 precisely because, up to their clean limits, they succeed in getting pretty close to a Twin Reverb clean sound at higher sound levels. Great for pedal steel, but I still prefer a tube amp for guitar. To me, amps are not just clinical signal amplifiers, but are an important part of tone production.

There are also many people that believe that the way a properly designed tube amp shifts phase as frequency and volume are increased is more "pleasing" than solid-state designs, even if they, technically, may have more and/or less-linear phase shift.

And if you push an amp hard in the higher-frequency range (e.g., Hugheyland), you can often hear almost ring-modulation-like artifacts. In fact, that's one of the biggest differences I notice between, let's say, blackface Fenders and later designs - I frequently hear more of those artifacts in the later amps. And I also notice those more in many solid-state designs. I haven't analyzed it carefully, but I have always suspected that the things you need to do to try to get the last bit of extra clean power out of a particular amp design ultimately cause more problems than they fix. I generally prefer the least number of components in the signal path needed to get a particular sound.

Class D is certainly different than old-school solid-state, but is certainly solid-state. I haven't had enough chance to play class D amps with guitar/steel to really evaluate this kind of stuff. I certainly like the power/weight ratio, but I've always been of the opinion that there are generally design tradeoffs.

Lee, 100K mi. is just getting broken in any more!
My brother in law just traded his '02 F250 at 225K. He towed a 5th wheel in from Tuscon the week before he got his new one.

If you're comparing apples to apples, say, a Twin against a Steelaire, it's going to be pretty subtle. The Steelaire wins on several points for me, not the leats of which is losing the 300Hz notch on a Twin.

If you're comparing a Steelaire against a 40W Blues Deluxe, it'll be much less subtle. The gain staging regimes for those amps are quite different.

And if you buy an amp made for steel, it'll probably have an input with less gain. I can overdrive the input to a Twin with a 1970s MSA U12 with an MSA Supersustain humbucker. I can't seem to overdrive the input on a Steelaire.

I could use a Twin but I'd need a better volume pedal or better pedal technique ( and lose some pedal range ). As it is with the Steelaire the "pedal loop" is perfect for a passive pedal.

Different transistors, different wiring scheme, no op amps. The early ss amps were quite different than todays. I had an early Lab amp that was a killer! It didn't sound anything like today's ss amps.

well I can attest first hand that the tube amps I own and use will go inside your ears and yank your eardrums out from the high end response !


Fenders: Blues jr, Blues Deluxe, Hot Rod Deluxe, Hot Rod Deville and the Carvin Vintage 50 which is EL84 based.

Which sound better for Steel + Guitars over a SS amp ? Well many have written books on the subject and the answer is still the same..."which one do YOU prefer" ?

Just my 2 cents but in the early seventies when I first joined a band playing steel I picked up a nice silver (non master vol.) Twin with JBL's which was pretty standard back then. We gigged a lot and that thing seemed to gain weight every time I moved it. Around '74 or so I get a call from a music store owner I knew who wanted me to test out this new amp from Peavey made just for steel. He said I could try it for a couple of weeks to see what I thought, ( I'm pretty sure that was just a sales trick). Well I picked it up and not being a fan of Peavey at the time didn't have high hopes but the first time I plugged in to it I was just amazed at the sound. Of course the rest of the guys said "you're gonna buy that, right?" Wish I still had that Session, one of the first ones. Man I've done some dumb things!

Some of the greatest steel recordings ever were made with solid state amps, but to me, the strings respond differently with a tube amp. Don't know the technical term, if there even is one, but the tube amp just feels better ( as long as it's not being unintentionally overdriven)

Sorry, double post