I can almost pick out the musicians in a crowd when I'm playing,you can just tell,and they're the only ones who come up afterwards and strike up conversations about the gear...the non musicians just talk about how much they liked the music,and the people who don't care just go away.

...the feel of liquidity (effortless playing manifesting out of nowhere) can only be *felt* and achieved with tubes. I'm discovering that SS cannot duplicate the liquidity of a tube!

It's surprising, but I run into many so-called "scientists" who don't seem to understand the scientific method.

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

Tubes must have magic powers.

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

Nope. Not magic. It can be explained.

Yeah, start with the Cheever Thesis: http://ebookbrowse.com/gdoc.php?id=1753 ... 45b14a5250

Cheers

David

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"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."

Treating it seriously for a moment, we don't know for sure whether or not the experiment was a good one: we just can't tell from the lousy write-up. To be fair to them, I expect they'd want to point out that they were Fender engineers searching for a product enhancement, not proper scientists. I'm not sure that's a defence against poor methodology, but...

The article seems to come out of Fullerton in 1981. Some of us will remember that the transistor amp was at a certain stage in its development at that time. The early flush of enthusiasm was past and the widespread perception had arisen amongst guitarists that it just didn't perform as well as the older valve/tube technology.

Reading between the lines, I guess the writers of the article were involved in trying to find out whether that perception was real and if so whether the pre-amp or power stage was more important in trying to improve solid state amplifiers.

Also reading between the lines, I think they are rather foggy about precisely what question their study is trying to answer, and that is why the results are so unhelpfully inconclusive.

On a side note, it would be fascinating to know who their "pro and semi-pro" participants were. We'd love to know who could and couldn't tell the difference between transistor and valve amps!

Cheers - C

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I can do a pretty concise test of wok vs wool, if you want. It's quite quick. Let me know. I'm on standby.

Nutter

I think the basic fact is that most transistor stuff these days is aimed at the bottom end of the market, so generally also comes with cheap cabinets, speakers, etc. Stick a cheaply designed tube circuit in a particle board cab and run it through a bargain basement driver and it'll sound and feel pretty terrible too. A glowing glass bottle does not make magic. A good amp is a good amp, regardless of what's inside.

I'm as much of a tube snob as anyone, but I've been fooled many times in the SS/tube debate when listening blind. Some of the best live tones I've ever heard have come from solid state gear, including once where I chatted to the guitarist afterwards and enthusiastically praised the tone of his battered old Fender Deluxe, only to be told that had failed during the soundcheck, and he'd actually been playing through the old 80's Proamp MOSFET combo just to the left of it.

In simple terms; tubes sympathetically vibrate with the guitar and speakers causing a vibrating loop that acts as an energy field that allows the finger muscles to relax via enhanced sustain, over-tones, feedback, and touch sensitivity as opposed to wrangling with a lifeless SS sound field due to a lack of tube type vibration sensor -- the missing link between tube and SS!

SS just can't go liquid, feel like a tube amp, until a vibration sensor is created within the electronics of the SS amp that acts like a tube does.

...what's cool is, the tube effect is so powerful, ...feckin' headphones will react with tubes to bring out sustain, overtones, and feedback.

I discovered the phenomena via an old SG and an old Fender Princeton Reverb amp back in 1973 and identified the source of the phenomena recently while using head phones and experimenting with SS and tube pre-amps.

...I can't believe how much time I wasted trying to find SS gear that could duplicate the tube effect, finally realizing that the only way to accomplish the tube effect, what I call "goin' liquid", is a sensor that acts like a tube. But, no pain...no gain I guess!

I prefer tubes.

Are there good sounding solid state amps? Yes, just as there are bad sounding tube amps, including some that (on paper) seemed to be very promising.

Ultimately, the difference is rarely heard by the non-musicians in the house...but the difference is there.

It would be hard to convince me that a comparably built (component, cab and speaker quality) solid state amp is going to have the same detailed dynamics and complex sound as similarly built tube amp...and that's the rub.

I was traveling back and forth between home and work for a while, and I would drag either my Pignose or my Gibson G-20  with me (weight, space and security concerns prevented me from taking my '63 reissue Vibroverb back and forth in my car). After playing through the G-20 almost exclusively for nine months, I was (1) remembering how good of an amp it is, and (2) thinking the Vibroverb was too much hassle...then I went to a friends house with the Vibroverb, and realized how the dynamics, tones and sounds were so (comparatively) lacking in the G-20.

The G-20 didn't sound bad--in fact, it sounds very good--but it just wasn't the same. The G-20 is nice, but the Vibroverb inspires me. The difference may not be in the sound itself as much as how the amplifier (as an instrument) makes a person play differently.

Will I ever buy another solid state amp? Sure, if it sounds good; but due to personal experience, I cannot believe there's no discernible difference between transistors and tubes.

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Good Vibes To Y'all!



Screamin' Armadillos
Texas Roadhouse Music
Guitar/Slide Guitar/Harp/Vocals

I didn't mean to imply that there are no differences between tubes and solid state. There are. But there's also differences between different types of tubes, for example 6L6 and EL84 have different saturation characteristics. All devices (solid state or tube) have numerous properties that define how they will amplify a signal. Plus any specific device, such as a 6V6 tube, will have variations within it's specifications - no two are identical.

Also, if you use the exact same devices in two different design topologies they're not going to sound the same.

Plus, parts 'drift' as they age so even the exact same amp will have a slight variation in tone as it ages.

It's complicated and can get really nerdy so just let your ear be judge - which I'm sure is what you're already doing.

Cheers,

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

Learn something new every day, and I thought it was the natural compression / soft clipping of tube vs no compression / abrupt clipping of solid state.

But back to the serious topic of rock and roll, let's not mix up meanings;

"Heck, the term “rock ’n’ roll” was first used to describe music – after being used by blues artists to describe sex – by the legendary disc jockey Alan Freed when he was spinning on WJW in Cleveland in the early 1950s, followed shortly by the first rock concert “riot,” also in Cleveland."

Long live rock 'n' roll!

So where do I get the sensor and how do I install it?

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

Never heard of a sensor that simulates a tube amp, but, boost and overdrive pedals try to simulate the break up / clipping of a tube amp and a compressor and some other pedals will give more sustain, maybe like a tube amp. Tube based pre amps, boosters and other tube base pedals get some tube effect, naturally.