amp construction/design question...

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JR#97

JR#97

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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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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