amp construction/design question...

[JR#97]

i've heard it explained that tube guitar amps sound like tubes because of the power amp tubes and not necessarily the pre-amp tubes. Yet most hybrid amps have tube pre's and solid state output stages. what gives??? I have a marshall artist 3203 that has a solid state pre-amp and a tube output stage. I front it with a mesa boogie v-twin...

anywho, I was thinking... would it make sense to have a tube pre-amp, then a single tube low wattage output stage to get that tube power, but in a smaller amount, and then feed it into a solid state output stage to get the 100 watts?

[Major Tom]

The new Valvetronix amps from Vox use a tube in that fashion, I guess they feed it with the modelled sound instead of a tube preamp though...Preamp distortion does sound different to me, its more "buzzy ", kinda like a fuzz pedal versus an overdrive/distortion pedal. I used to have a Peavey Mace head many years ago, it had a transistor preamp, with tube a power amp. I play reasonably clean, and use an overdrive for dist, that was one rockin' amp when cranked. All kinds of bargains on used gear out there, for now if you want a real cranked tube amp sound, get a tube amp, and crank it.

[Peter Maydew]

The "real" tube sound comes from the interaction between the output tubes, the transformer and the speaker(s). In other words, hybrid amps don't quite make it for the purist: for the rest of us they're ok.

Your idea is really just extending the tubed preamp configuration; it ain't an output stage until it has to drive a speaker.

One way to go about this is to have a low powered tube amp (a few watts only) driving either a small speaker that you mic up, or a speaker simulator if they're still available. I've successfully used the former approach - in one case I gave more bite to a recorded guitar part by playing it back through an amp and speaker and re-recording the result.

[JR#97]

the more i thought about it, the more i realized it wouldn't work the way i thought anyway. a power soak would be the better alternative.