Difference between solid state and tube

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nate_dennis

nate_dennis

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I'm trying to understand the diffence as, it pertains to tone, between solid state and tube amps. I know most blues guitarists and a lot of "classic" rockers use tube, and a lot of metal guys use solid state. Is it impossible/hard to get warmth from solid state? Just trying to get my head around all this stuff. Thanks guys.
 
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The simple answer is that a tube amp uses one or more vacuum tubes to amplify the signal, while a solid-state amp uses solid-state electronics (diodes, transistors, etc.) to amplify the signal. On paper and in theory these two implementations should yield identical result, but in actuality the difference is usually noticeable.

But the simple answer fails to answer to the complexity of the issue. Many amps are not simply tube or solid-state, but mixes of both kinds, called "hybrids." This usually means that they have a tube preamp stage, employing vacuum tubes in the tone shaping circuitry, but use solid-state circuitry for the power section. The hybrids are closer to full tube amps in response and tonal warmth, but purists will still find a difference between the two. Tube amps are generally more expensive in initial cost and to operate (because you need to replace the tubes occasionally), and solid-state amps are generally less delicate and more reliable. Many players, however, feel that tube amps yield a warmer, more musical tone and better distortion.

Yet another wrinkle is tube emulation circuitry. Many amps and preamps have sophisticated circuits designed to act like tubes, and as in all things, some are better than others. The newest develop in amps are the modeling amps, which not only emulate the tone and response of tubes, but of specific tube amps. These are in general pretty exciting amps, but again, some are better than others at getting specific models, and in maintaining the sounds through a range of volume levels.

Another point to make about tube amps is that bigger is not always better. You get the distinctive tube sound most when the amp is cranked up enough that the tubes are saturated or nearly saturated. For this reason, it is often better to choose a lower wattage amp over a higher wattage amp, depending on how and where you play. By the time you crank up your 60 watt amp enough to saturate the tubes to get just the right level of distortion, you could be blowing your audience out the back door. It might have been better to choose a 20W amp that lets you get your saturated tone without the ear-killing decibels.
 
I understand the difference in how they work, but my question is more geared toward the tonal differences. Are there any solid state amps you guys recomend for warm tones or should I get a tube amp for that?
 
nate_dennis said:
I understand the difference in how they work, but my question is more geared toward the tonal differences. Are there any solid state amps you guys recomend for warm tones or should I get a tube amp for that?
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Hearing is subjective, tastes differ, and there is no way to test an amp for "warmth". Try as many amps as you can and trust your ears.
 
Roland Jazz Chorus is generally a solid recommendation for decent solid state clean amp.

The tone difference has to some degree something to do with how the diff circuits apply distortion-- in the sense that as you amplify a signal, when you push to a certain level the signal is affected. There is all sorts of stuff about home some signals are clipped and become boxey or others are jaggedy and such (note my lack of expertise in how poorly i am failing to explain this properly).

Bottom line as far as recommending an amp, wanting to go "warm" in tone (which could mean lots of things to different people), you want a tube amp. You can def get a decent warm sound from many solid state amps, but on average the tube amp will have a nicer tone, and will do other things better as well.


Daav
 
Roguetitan said:
The simple answer is that a tube amp uses one or more vacuum tubes to amplify the signal, while a solid-state amp uses solid-state electronics (diodes, transistors, etc.) to amplify the signal.
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Diodes for amplification?
:cool:
 
This is one of the great folklore areas of guitar amps. "Everybody" knows that tubes are warm, transistors are sterile, etc etc.

The sad truth is that there are ghastly sounding tube amps and great sounding transistor amps, and trying to reduce the whole variety into a mantra is best suited for late-night discussion rather than serious inquiry. I'm old enough to remember when ALL amps (and tape decks, and radios, and televisions) were vacuum tube based, and it wasn't paradise. Consider constantly waiting for the tubes to warm up -- such as a short spin in your car -- before you could listen to the radio.

Engineers rightly embraced transistors -- much less heat, much smaller (even seen photos of the vacuum tube computers?) and generally more efficient -- but they gave them a bad name by applying the technology to guitar amps before anybody had figured out how to make the circuits sound good.

Tubes benefited from Leo Fender, who spent many a happy hour alone in his work lab, tweaking the circuits (it's not often noted that pre-Fender amps, tubes notwithstanding, weren't anything any of us would play through these days). Transistors had no such genius, but the information has slowly been absorbed into the amplifiers.

Nowadays, fifteen-year-olds talk with an air of knowledge about tubes the same way their equivalents did about four-barrel carburetors back in MY day, and it means just about as much.

I bought my first amp, which, of course, had tubes, in 1974. Since then I have owned quite a few, and now my main amp is also my first transistor (AKA solid state) amp: a Fender Jazzmaster Ultralight. It blows away all of the tube amps I've owned, and everyone who hears it loves it. And I still hear "no, I gotta have tubes."

So do yourself a favor, and buy with your ears, and not your preconceptions.

And another thing: after humping up and down stairs with any number of hundred-pound tube amps, this little gem weighs 25.6 lb, including all its 250 watts and 12" speaker.
 
nate_dennis said:
...and a lot of metal guys use solid state...
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i often wonder if that's NOT because solid-state is better (for metal), but because it doesn't matter if you have a tube amp for certain kinds of metal tones. surely, metal started out and for a while continued as an all-tube genre (even though, unlike the blues and 50's rock it was after transistor guitar amps were available).
 
lpdeluxe said:
This is one of the great folklore areas of guitar amps. "Everybody" knows that tubes are warm, transistors are sterile, etc etc.

The sad truth is that there are ghastly sounding tube amps and great sounding transistor amps, and trying to reduce the whole variety into a mantra is best suited for late-night discussion rather than serious inquiry. I'm old enough to remember when ALL amps (and tape decks, and radios, and televisions) were vacuum tube based, and it wasn't paradise. Consider constantly waiting for the tubes to warm up -- such as a short spin in your car -- before you could listen to the radio.

Engineers rightly embraced transistors -- much less heat, much smaller (even seen photos of the vacuum tube computers?) and generally more efficient -- but they gave them a bad name by applying the technology to guitar amps before anybody had figured out how to make the circuits sound good.

Tubes benefited from Leo Fender, who spent many a happy hour alone in his work lab, tweaking the circuits (it's not often noted that pre-Fender amps, tubes notwithstanding, weren't anything any of us would play through these days). Transistors had no such genius, but the information has slowly been absorbed into the amplifiers.

Nowadays, fifteen-year-olds talk with an air of knowledge about tubes the same way their equivalents did about four-barrel carburetors back in MY day, and it means just about as much.

I bought my first amp, which, of course, had tubes, in 1974. Since then I have owned quite a few, and now my main amp is also my first transistor (AKA solid state) amp: a Fender Jazzmaster Ultralight. It blows away all of the tube amps I've owned, and everyone who hears it loves it. And I still hear "no, I gotta have tubes."

So do yourself a favor, and buy with your ears, and not your preconceptions.

And another thing: after humping up and down stairs with any number of hundred-pound tube amps, this little gem weighs 25.6 lb, including all its 250 watts and 12" speaker.
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Not to mention how many people pay big bucks for boutique distortion/overdrive, and then post how sacrilege it is to use anything but a tube amp. Even though the pedal takes on the character of the amp, it still has plenty of the character it was built...transistors, opamps, and diodes. "But its a well made design and is done right", but never is any amp not 100% pure vacuum tube done right. :rolleyes:
 
Outlaws said:
Not to mention how many people pay big bucks for boutique distortion/overdrive, and then post how sacrilege it is to use anything but a tube amp. Even though the pedal takes on the character of the amp, it still has plenty of the character it was built...transistors, opamps, and diodes. "But its a well made design and is done right", but never is any amp not 100% pure vacuum tube done right. :rolleyes:
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any time I use distortion it is through overdriving theamp not a pedal.
there are other pedals like Chorus, auto wah, ect
and a pedal does not take on the charicteristics of the amp:rolleyes:
 
While I was testing out guitars in the store, a guy complimented my playing and asked me to try a couple different amps. He said that he's just a beginner and that I could give the amps a better workout than he could. A little flattered, I said okay.

I talked about all my expertise about how you have to get a tube amp if you want a good blues sound. That's what he's after. We tried a couple out, including the used gear. Some truly awful tube amps were in the mix. We found a used Fender something or other that was just screaming. I mean it had full on, warm, sparkling, howling tone.

I said, "There ya go. Gotta have tone like that." We agreed this was the winner. I said, "Can't get that sound unless you have the tubes." He said, "Uh, but this one is solid state." I pulled the amp forward and stared in disbelief at the back panel - he was right.

It was $200 less than the sorry tube combos we tried. I said "Buy this and never look back." As far as I know, he's rockin that solid state Fender combo to this day.

I have a dream, that one day, an amplifier will be judged by the SOUND IT MAKES and not the transistors in its circuits. I also dream of a day when more than 2% of people on the internet know what they're talking about. Which will come first?
 
Outlaws said:
So you are saying a Tubescreamer is a Tubescreamer when used with a tube amp vs going into a solidstate?
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No I didn't say anything about tube screamers.
you said....
Outlaws said:
"Not to mention how many people pay big bucks for boutique distortion/overdrive, and then post how sacrilege it is to use anything but a tube amp. Even though the pedal takes on the character of the amp, it still has plenty of the character it was built...transistors, opamps, and diodes. "But its a well made design and is done right", but never is any amp not 100% pure vacuum tube done right".
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distortion pedals emulate overdriven amp tone but does not take on the charicteristic of the amp it is played through.
 
Polytone amps have a warm tone. Best SS amps I've heard. But they are generally played clean. The problem with SS amps comes in when they start to clip. A quality tube amp clips "smooth" and a SS amp clips "harsh". Your mileage may vary. I'm not a metal dude but I think "harsh" isn't totally frowned upon in that genre.
 
GOYA said:
Polytone amps have a warm tone. Best SS amps I've heard. But they are generally played clean. The problem with SS amps comes in when they start to clip. A quality tube amp clips "smooth" and a SS amp clips "harsh". Your mileage may vary. I'm not a metal dude but I think "harsh" isn't totally frowned upon in that genre.
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The science behind that, btw, is that vacuum tubes can easily create the even ordered harmonics (2nd, 4th, 8th, etc.) and transistors are -very bad- at this. Both designs also create the odd ordered harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc.). In tube amps these are small compared to the even order, but in transistor amps this is basically all there is.

Even order harmonics sound smooth and song-like (Hendrix's wailing, sustaining, feeding-back tone) while the even order harmonics sound harsh (dime any regular SS amp and enjoy).
 
RejectionNinja said:
The science behind that, btw, is that vacuum tubes can easily create the even ordered harmonics (2nd, 4th, 8th, etc.) and transistors are -very bad- at this. Both designs also create the odd ordered harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc.). In tube amps these are small compared to the even order, but in transistor amps this is basically all there is.
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Actually it's not too hard to get a transistor to generate second-order; in fact that's usually the dominant distortion in a circuit. Build yourself a guitar amp out of a single MOSFET in class-A config and see what you get!

The trouble with transistors is they are so cheap that it becomes tempting to sprinkle a circuit with many of them, therein cancelling out all kinds of distortion until extreme levels are reached, then there is a sudden onset of clipping, which is lots of harmonics and usually all of them! But that's more of a high-order vs. low-order problem that even vs. odd.
 
Ah thanks for the info. I'm not an EE, I'm just surrounded by them in real life. :D
 
At least part of the story is historical; early SS designs would hard clip, i.e., the voltage they produced would go linearly right up to the rails and then stop abruptly, whereas a power tube output begins to slow its rate of increase as it approaches a rail, i.e., soft clip. Hard clipping sounds terrible (to me, anyway).

This was a well known problem with SS amps, and modern designers have put a lot of work into getting SS designs to soft clip, with varying degrees of success. I am still a tube guy, but I will admit to playing on some modern SS amps that sounded pretty damn good to my ears.
 
ggunn said:
I am still a tube guy, but I will admit to playing on some modern SS amps that sounded pretty damn good to my ears.
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Ya I think just about anything Roland makes sounds good: guitars, Bass and keyboard amps
and the little cubes has a good distortion
I have a little cube 15 that I have used to record with
and it has been mikd live several times which sounds good going through a PA.
 
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