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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Tue May 03, 2011 8:04 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2008 1:53 pm
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Location: usa
generally people have ears. intelligence is another matter.

seeing as how these people are your friends, would you really expect them to say anything else? how about your enemies? or when you're not around?

before any fuses get blown, i just want to say that formulating a dispassionate conclusion is very difficult, i just wanted to point out the possibility of being wrong.

cheers,
john.


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 4:08 pm
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ButchA wrote:
thereverend wrote:
Tube technology will still be around and pure tube amps will never die. The only amp that I have ever heard that literally made my jaw drop, was a buddy's Peavey Bandit (w/ an extension speaker - it looked like a mini stack) that had that "Transtube" technology. I don't know what Peavey did, but they did a heck of a job mimicing the tone of a true tube amp.


You should check out Hartley Peavey's story of TransTube:

http://www.peavey.com/support/technotes/hartley/chapter_3.pdf


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 3:08 pm
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Great question. There are a few aspects to this: 1) what does the listener (bar patron, concertgoer, etc.) hear, and does the technology used to make the sound make any difference? 2) Irrespective of the technology, to what extent does the player him/herself determine what comes out of the speaker? 3) Again, irrespective of the technology, does the sound inspire the player (we've all had the "I can't stop playing" experience with the golden combo of the right guitar and amp)? I think all these are related in the sense that a sound that pleases a player will result in playing that, reinforced by the instrument(s) will delight and move the listener. Isn't that what it's all about? I know players who can move me to ecstasy with equipment that would be laughed off most stages (Danny Barnes comes to mind). Ansel Adams used Polaroid cameras and film; he was not a standard-emulsion view-camera bigot and probably would have embraced digital photography - whatever allowed him to realize what he visualized. The image, not the gear, mattered. Go to a store with your fave guitar, put on a blindfold, and let the sales person plug you into various amps and tweak the dials for you. Buy what moves you. Forget about the technology. BTW I use a Roland Cube, a Fender Mustang III, a SuperSonic 112, a Mesa 5:50, a little Line 6 pocket pod, and computer-based amp models. They all are awesome for their own reasons.


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 4:43 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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woo-hoo! upgrade to hot topic status! :mrgreen:

yea...its clear now that these things will be around a looong time. now we wait for better tube manufacturing practices :roll:


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 2:00 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Sun Dec 05, 2010 12:38 am
Posts: 392
untill i find a solid state amp that sounds way way better than my deluxe im sticking with tubes... if all the companies go down they will go down slowly... and ill be stocking up on spare tubes... make sure i have enough to last me a long while... :P hopefully musicians will continue to use tubes... will be sad to see them go...

_________________
blues - its a religion...


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 12:54 pm
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My first amp was given to me...a little peavey rage amp when I was 13 and started playing...then my next amp was a Classic 30. At first it was not my thing until I realized that I had to crank it to make her sing. After that.....NEVER looked back.

There is still a stigma for people....and I've been one of them. You still have a lot of people that will thumb their nose at solid state and modeling technology just because they've been brought up and bottle fed tubes, valves, whatever you want to call them.

I've tried modeling amps and never really liked what I've heard, but things have certainly come a LONG way from when I started playing 17 years ago. I'll be turning 30 this July and in the early 90's when I picked up an axe for the first time I got HEAVY in to everything from Steeley Dan to Zep and Trower. So, tubes were my one and only thing I wanted to deal with.

Last month, however I purchased a Super Champ XD. Never would I have envisioned myself playing through DSP technology other than trying a friends rig or messing around at the music store to kill some time.

All I can say is boy does Fender have a winner in that little Champ. I get the best of both worlds and it sounds good....but then again....does it really or is it just the fact that the amp has tubes? My personal opinion....nah it sounds killer.

I'm just chiming in my two cents here. I'm a tube freak....I can't imagine EVER going full solid state in any way. I think the SCXD is as close as I'll get. There are just too many of us purists at heart still salivating for one more hit of analog tone mainlined through our veins via a hypodermic needle to the ear drum from crystal clears when raking our strings to dirty, grisley, crunchy ecstasy when digging into whatever we're playing.

I'm going to just say that I want to be the hopeless romantic with rose colored glasses that believes only good will prevail and tubes will never die. Without tubes...my world is no longer perfect. I think the SCXD is a great marriage of the two technologies that can keep a happy medium, but if tubes go away completely.......let's just say the snozberries will no longer taste like snozberries and it would be a dark day for us guitarists.


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 1:55 pm
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Roadie
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I'm older than a lot of the posters here and I have very mixed feelings on this since I saw the rise of S/S to replace tubes in most things..I still remember car radios with tubes!

I'm fairly new to the guitar amp side but I can tell you that a basic push-pull tube amp is pretty generic from PA to music reproduction. The other day, a friend lent me an unpowered 12" speaker in a combo case--amp long gone. I hooked one of my old Dynaco PAM preamps (Mono, tube) to a Dynaco Mark IV power amp--Mono, tube, 35wpch at 8 ohms. We started to bang on it--he's many years beyond me in playing. He was stunned: "Wow! That's always the sound I'm looking for in blues" says he. I was not surprised: A basic tube power amp is a basic tube power amp. Dynaco built for the audiophile who had the ear but not the money, so would build it from a kit, though you could get it assembled from them.

But when I was growing up, I lived through the conversion of Hi-Fi from tube to S/S and never thought twice about it: "Oh, tubes are old-fashioned. They hum. They put out heat. They burn out. They break.

Then it was worse: in the mid to late 70's Dynaco's Mark III power amp, a 60 watt monoblock put out, at 60 watts 8ohms, 1% total harmonic distortion. Standards for S/S at the time was 0.02% or 1/50th of the Tube!

But in the late 90's I got back into the stuff, and had heard all the hype. I didn't believe it until I heard it. I didn't believe that vinyl was better than CDs. How could it be? So I put an Ellen McIlwaine album on my turntable, the same on my CD player, adjusted them to the same volume and couldn't believe what I heard! The whole midrange on the LP was clear, distinct and natural, muddy and "out of focus" on the CD!

Same with a tube amp I got to play with, a little 17.5wpch integrated amp...at first it was "what's the big deal? I just wasted $!00!" Then I fixed some failed components and WOW! I couldn't believe something so small could sound so natural! And I was hooked!

But it doesn't mean I'm against solid state. For H/T there's nothing else. I suppose you could get a dig decoder preamp and run 7 monoblocks, but why? Then there's the new digital Class D ICE amp....sounds like Class A. Music is good and easy to reproduce.

But....when you can't tell a tube amp from a solid state, then the tube amp's time is past.

BTW, the reason older amps may sound better is the tubes are different. Modern tubes of the same spec may or may not sound as good as the originals in older amps. It's not that new ones are "bad", it's that they are different, having been developed for Soviet and Chinese applications.

But as long as your ear prefers a tube amp to a S/S/Modeling amp, go with it! When it doesn't, or doesn't care, it's time for S/S.


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 4:10 pm
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Yanktar wrote:

But in the late 90's I got back into the stuff, and had heard all the hype. I didn't believe it until I heard it. I didn't believe that vinyl was better than CDs. How could it be? So I put an Ellen McIlwaine album on my turntable, the same on my CD player, adjusted them to the same volume and couldn't believe what I heard! The whole midrange on the LP was clear, distinct and natural, muddy and "out of focus" on the CD!

Same with a tube amp I got to play with, a little 17.5wpch integrated amp...at first it was "what's the big deal? I just wasted $!00!" Then I fixed some failed components and WOW! I couldn't believe something so small could sound so natural! And I was hooked



You, sir, hit the nail right on the head! It really is amazing to listen to an analog and digital signal side to side or back to back and hear the difference.

CD may be digital and "better" in some aspects, but an analog signal is a smooth uninterrupted wave while digital is either on or off.. It's extremely difficult to find a digital reproduction of an analog signal that has the warmth of the original analog recording.


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Post subject: Re: The future of vacuum tubes...what lies ahead?
Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 5:24 pm
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Roadie
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Funny thing, though, the EARLY CDs were awesome..I still have some. Plus there were the direct-to-digital LPs as well, like Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop.

But I think that for a digital to stand out, it takes an engineer dedicated to making it the best it can be. The early CDs had to do that. In 1980, 1981, a CD player cost $1000 minimum, and the CDs were $30. For that expense they HAD to perform better than their LP counterparts or Compact Disc would go the way of the 8-track. So a lot more effort went into the engineer to get it just as good as it could be, and it showed.

They were really big on the dynamic range being much greater than LPs, which had to compress it.

Then LPs started dying and CDs took off....and they got sloppy.


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