Hmmm. I don't think any of these clips sound very real. I'm not dissing the playing, but the recordings themselves suck. There are also some nasty MP3 artifacts...ringing and buzzing...alot just from the tape noise, but it directly interferes with the guitars.
#1 is sort of the tone I would shoot for. Bright and smooth. I would want this to be the tube amp, but what's with the buzzing and ringing...makes it sound very very thin and digital? I can't tell what this is. Sounds sorta like a marshall amp hiding behind all that crap. In this style of guitar, a tube amp isn't going to sound big and fat, it's going to sound smooth. I believe that slash uses a marshall stack, and his tone was more smooth than fat.
#2 sounds bigger, but it's just all around a better recording. Not fair to judge this one against the first one but.... I would guess this to be the Line6, with the line6 or solid state amp coming in for the rythym which is super crass.
#3 is the worst tone-wise of all, so it's hard to judge. It's very muddy and hard to tell exactly what it is. The muddiness has me jumping up and saying Line6, but I just can't do it with any assurance. The distortion quality has me thinking that it's the solid state.
This isn't fair in many respects. First of all there should be a certain tone you're shooting for. I don't reckon that you'd use any of these clips in a real recording. Just turning three amps on and randomly positioning a microphone in front of all three doesn't make it fair. In fact, it only proves that a crappy amp can sound better than a great amp in a recording, and emphisizes the importance of placement, room, and EQ (both on the guitar and amp). Finally, we don't know what amps we're dealing with...there are plenty of garbage tube amps, and some pretty nice sounding solid states.
But since this is the big "contest" or whatever, and I'm always nagging about the stupid POD...I guess it's only fair that I make my guesses official:
1) Tube
2) Line6, perhaps the rythm is s/s
3) s/s
For recording quality, though, I would say #2, #3, then #1, only because #1 is flawed to the point where it's unusable (for whatever reason).
Slackmaster 2000