Klarinet Archive - Posting 000350.txt from 2004/09

From: "Mark Charette" <charette@-----.org>
Subj: RE: [kl] A bit off topic: vacuum tubes in amplifiers ??
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:16:56 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ormondtoby Montoya [mailto:ormondtoby@-----.net]
> To Mark, Benjamin Maas, etc:
>
> While my daughter was taking her first electric bass guitar lesson
> today, a fellow in the store told me that transistorized amplifiers
> cannot equal the range of response that an amplifier with vacuum tubes
> has.
>
> Is this true? Or is it more a matter of economcs (sufficient
> transistor circuits to equal old-time vacuum tubes would cost more than
> the average customer wants to pay). Or is it simply incorrect?

Tubes overload & respond differently than transistors - they sound
different. For a very long time transistor amps just clipped overloads,
causing harsh tones. They ended up with abad rep for a long time.

Nowadays, transistor amplifiers are much more forgiving and are in some
sense better than tubes ever were - the response can be a lot flatter than
tubes were and overload protection can be a lot "gentler". Indeed, you can
buy active preamp/equalizers to give a transistor amp the old "warm" tube
sound and if you closed your eyes you really couldn't tell the difference.
There was another thing inherent in tube amps - when you replaced the tubes
when they burned out it might not sound the same. In my younger days I had a
tube amp where I had to buy the 2 output tubes as a matched set, or bad
things would happen to the sound and longevity of the final output stage.

Transistor amps are considerebly less expensive than tube amps of any
complexity; the tube amps have a premium "cachet" attached to them, and the
tubes themselves are incredibly expensive. I think all tube production has
moved to Russia now.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org