Difference between solid state and tube

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RejectionNinja said:
I have a dream, that one day, an amplifier will be judged by the SOUND IT MAKES and not the transistors in its circuits.
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First off, that's hillarious!!!!

Second off, I wish that I could do that. I live in an area where the nearest decent music store (A Guitarget) is 8 hours a way. So it's a major production to get the family down there to shop amps. So I'm just trying to gather information. My goal is honestly to do away my preconceptions. I want to get a good amp b/c it's good.

I really appreciate all the info. You guys are great!
 
The first time I heard and felt a difference between a tube amp and a solid state amp was a very specific thing. Maybe you can recreate it next time you play though a tube amp.

I played on a Fender Princeton Chorus red-knob for 10 years (A solid-state 25 watt x 2 channel stereo 2x10). So every little thing about how my guitar sounded through that amp was very familiar to me. Then one day I played through a friend's Peavey Classic 50 4x10 in his jam room. So we had total freedom for volume. A 50-watt tube amp through 4 10" speakers is nothing to sneeze at, its pretty loud. I turned the post amp gain to 7 or 8, put the preamp gain to 3 or 4, and played a song of mine that I'd been playing for years. Blues/rock Stones/Allman Brothers kinda thing.

I played his Fender Coronado semi-hollow through the amp, not my normal guitar either. I play a LP Classic so a semi-hollow Fender is pretty different. But still I could hear the difference every time I played any notes in first position on the guitar. Anything within the first 5 frets had a sweetness that I'd never felt or heard before. Mainly on the bridge pickup but I could detect it on the neck pickup as well. But every time I let a note on that area of the neck ring out, or bend it up, it was just so appealing.

Shortly thereafter, I started shopping for a tube amp of my own. Due to available features and a match for my tastes, I settled on the Traynor YCV80. A quick aside: a 50-watt 4x10 is pretty damn loud. But an 80-watt 2x12 is even more painful when cranked. Watch your wattage and don't buy anything that you can't crank regularly. If you can crank a 100 watter without suffering hearing loss or a disturbing the peace citation, more power to ya (hey a pun!). After fiddling with the combination lock of a gain structure, I settled on similar settings to my friend's Classic 50: low preamp gain and high post amp gain. Suppliment with pedal overdrive when necessary. Hit it with a compressor/sustainer with a lot of makeup gain and a low threshold to hold it in the sweet spot for solos and big riffs.

The other big difference I hear is upwards of the 12th fret on the lower strings, especially on the low E string. The more post amp gain, the more I hear this difference.

I also love the sound of open strings ringing out with similar settings as I described above but with my TubeScreamer set to totally neutral settings (all 12:00). Oh man an open A string ringing out with these settings? Fuggeddabouddit!

Try some of these specific things on a tube amp next time you get a chance to crank one up. If none of these things make a difference in what you play, then maybe a tube amp won't be worth the investment. Or maybe once you plug into one you'll find specific things that sound more or less pleasant to you.
 
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Roguetitan said:
distortion pedals emulate overdriven amp tone but does not take on the charicteristic of the amp it is played through.
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There is no set sound that a pedal makes. It has to be amplified, which inserts an almost infinite variable into the equation. Think of the pedal as only half a circuit, with the other half supplied by you. A warm amp is going to make a pedal warmer. A bright amp is going to make a pedal brighter.

How is that not taking on the character of the amp?
 
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).
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What metal are we talking about? All the serious metal players I know are rocking some form of a Boogie, Marshall, 5150, etc.....I can probably count on one hand all of the metal shows that I have been to that involved a non tube amp on stage.....?
 
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Outlaws said:
There is no set sound that a pedal makes. It has to be amplified, which inserts an almost infinite variable into the equation. Think of the pedal as only half a circuit, with the other half supplied by you. A warm amp is going to make a pedal warmer. A bright amp is going to make a pedal brighter.

How is that not taking on the character of the amp?
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the pedal is sending a processed signal to the amp nothing more than that.
 
Outlaws said:
Okay, I see what you are hitting on, but what about an effects loop? :D
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:confused:

running the fx processor through the effects loop on the amp instead of in line with the guitar gives you more tonal control of the amp but still the floor pedal has its own distinct circuitry and charicteristics.:)
 
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One thing that has been mentioned, but not amplified sufficiently (pun intended) IMO is the difference in "feel." Solid state and emulator amps can sound very good, and are getting to the point where they can fool even an educated ear on a recording or live. However, the way a tube amp physically creates sound is not currently being duplicated by anything else. There is an indescribable expressiveness inherent in a good tube powered amp played well up into it's power handling potential. The textured touch-responsiveness feeds the player's ear, and rewards dynamic playing (alternatively, it can punish shoddy playing...). By contrast, most SS or digital amps put out a less nuanced, more compressed-feeling sound, generating a more consistent note regardless of the touch applied by the player. The result is the relatively static feel that a player may interpret as poorer tone.
 
It's the pixie dust injected into the tubes.

Or, could it be a delusion propagated by the thought, that, gee, I'm playing the sacred vacuum tube?

...nah.
 
Wireneck said:
What metal are we talking about? All the serious metal players I know are rocking some form of a Boogie, Marshall, 5150, etc.....I can probably count on one hand all of the metal shows that I have been to that involved a non tube amp on stage.....?
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Yeah, most metal guys are rocking tubes......
 
My first tube amp was a Laney Pro tube 50.

I was playing metal, and I had the oportunity to plug into a Randall RG100.

I sold my Laney to fund purchasing the Randall. It was the amp that Dimebag later made famous.

It was amazing for Metal.

But if you were looking for the soft clipping sound of say Hendrix playing Hey Joe, you weren't going to get it from that amp.

I still say the Randall RG100es may be one of the best all time SS amps ever made.

I have heard some great sounding solid state amps and some terrible tube amps.

As others have posted, the big difference is when the amps start to distort because of being overdriven. SS do not sound good when forced to distort.

In fact, the exact reason you see SS amps that are listed at 300+ watts is for that very reason. to overcome the fact that they don't sound good when overpowered.
 
Hybrid amps that have a tube in the preamp sound quite warm. I picked up a used AVT50 that sounds very warm. I upgraded it by putting in a Weber Silver Bell with an Alnico magnet.

I played a JCM-900 at my most recent gig. Not very impressed. Very little bass. No depth. My AVT50 sounds quite a bit better.
 
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