But in general, since the transistors took over, they've been available for about $10 in current dollars, only a little more expensive than they were back in the 1960s. US manufacturing faded out in the 80s, but tubes were manufactured elsewhere commonly into the 90s. It's apparently still profitable to manufacture them for $10 or so, at least with legacy tube-making equipment.
The real expensive ones are like binned semiconductor parts. The best frequency response, least micro-vibrations, etc. Or manually selected pairs with similar properties. But if you just want to replace the pre-amp and don't care much they were like $12 just a couple years ago.
So I don't know what the collectors are doing, really. Not exactly a market you can corner so long as people keep burning out their tubes and multiple companies keep making them.
Tube amps used in creating music usually have a distinctive sound. Fender Twin Reverb and Ampeg SVT are but two of the many tube amps with a distinctive sound. Solid state amps typically have a very different sound.
Yes, there are digital amp simulators and yes they are very good nowadays. But lots of musicians want the real thing.
That may not appeal to you, and you may dismiss it, but that’s the case. People generally aren’t buying an expensive tube guitar amp because they think they’re rare - tube amps are not hard to find. They’re buying them because they like the sound.
Tubes in hifi equipment is a whole other ballgame. No comment on that one.
You’re giving guitar players too much credit, they are only one step below “audiophiles” in their love for snake oil and marketing.
Tube amps persist mostly because guitar players instinctively turn their nose up at solid state, due to tubes having been the state of the art when the first generation of world famous electric guitarists was young.
Bass players are slightly better, mostly because an SVT head weighs 80 pounds and nobody wants to lug them around.
On the other hand, tube amps are a PIA and are prone to having those delicate tubes shake their innards apart if jostled the wrong way, not to mention their backbreaking heft. Therefore I use a solid state/modeler amp on stage, because of far better reliability, weight reduction, and versatility. Now there are even pedal amps, with class D power amps built in, so guitarists need only bring their pedalboard and maybe a cab. But when it comes to recording, most studios are still gonna prefer genuine, preferably vintage, tube amps.
Nobody really gives a shit about your tone on stage anyway.
The only reason that solid state is now catching up to tube nowadays is that:
* Front of house tech and home recording has made riding cranked amp tone live in a live environment a hassle, both technically and in terms of achieving the sounds that are being recorded
* Solid state can credibly emulate tube tone now (this has happened on things like tube compressors, too)
Having said all that, any time spent in the guitar pedal market (particularly around dirt boxes) will convince anyone that guitarists are indeed, as you say, total suckers for snake oil and marketing. :)
I agree with you, but I think solid state amps have only been "good" for the last 5-10 years at most, which is a pretty short time to change everyone's mind, habits, and equipment. So be gentle :)
Vinyl records are merch and you don't need any reason to buy one beyond wanting a keepsake with more interest than a poster.
I think there's something to be said about the overlap of Taylor Swift fans with audiophiles, too.
It's worth noting: The nonlinearities in the tube amps are very different from the solid-state amps. So the right thing to compare it to is one of the newer digital sims with an appropriate IR response, scanned over different input strengths to simulate the nonlinearities.
And I say this as someone with a 70s vintage Fender Twin Reverb: The emulators are really good.
I expect that would improve tube sales, rather dramatically. Lower priced, high quality tubes, made without slave labor or something near it, and with actual quality control? That would be rather popular in many circles.
I'm aware it's an unpopular thing to point out on HN, but we are very much in the middle of a vinyl resurgence, with LPs having drastically outsold CDs in 2022, and showing no signs of slowing down. Make fun of it however you want, but there's very strong interest right now in analog, non-digital, non-consumer-tech, non-tracked-and-data-collection sound. Tubes go well with that, and quite a few high end audio vendors these days have various tube amps in addition to their semiconductor based amps.
It seems a good place to be, and I wish him the best of luck with it - I may have to see if I can acquire a set or two down the road when prices drop a bit.
But vinyl is selling radically more, year over year, every year since 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival#/media/File:US_v...
To finish the graph out, 2021 was 41.7M and 2022 is 43.5M.
You can write it off however you want, but to dismiss it as irrelevant is a good way to miss what's going on in the world.
ever notice how after a destructive tornado they say "it looks like a bomb went off", and after a bomb goes off they say "it's like a tornado blew through here". Not the same situation as the CDs, but the same in that my brain says "wait a minute..." and if you want to impress the listener, you don't want them thinking "now holup"
I appreciate your attempt to explain the phenomenon, but unpicking your words I don't find myself much wiser. CDs are not tracked or data-collected either. Vinyl players are every bit as much "consumer tech" as CD players. As for "analog" and "non-digital, they mean the same thing - but why should they be in demand? They sound worse. And before you say "it's not about the sound", sure, but even for intangible "souvenir" value, the only disadvantage a CD has over a vinyl record is that it's smaller. And surely it's at least a little bit about the sound? After all, they're not buying empty covers.
The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less.
Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
The mistake with most solid state guitar amps is that they have similar wattages to tube amps. At stage volumes, it's easy for a measly 50 or 100W thing to go into clipping.
If you want solid-state guitar amplification, skip guitar amps and use a high wattage power amp used for sound reinforcement. E.g. something that puts out like 800W or more into a 4 Ohm load. This will have the headroom not to crap out when competing with the other guitarist's 100W head.
Not only that, but it will cost you less $$$ (particularly in the second hand market), and likely weigh less than your friend's 100W tube head.
Solid state guitar amps from guitar amp companies are snake oil, basically. They are not representative of what you can do with solid state.
Did you know Eddie Van Halen used solid state amps? One thing he did was to use a Marhsall tube amp head as a giant guitar pre-amp: capture the speaker output, reduced to line level, and re-amplify with a power amp, like a H&H V800.
But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on.
There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse.
I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work.
Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.
I'm not saying it's not nostalgia, it could very well be....
A naive view point is that the analog output of an analog device is going to be smooth.
The digital output will add noise on the stair step transitions.
I'm not saying this is the case in reality. I'm just saying, it's useful to think about when dealing with analog vs digital signals.
LOL, what? Tubes produce the distortion you hear in most branches of heavy metal, and iconic sounds throughout the whole spectrum of guitar rock.
In its raw form, it sounds awful; it has to be carefully shaped by filters, to remove high frequency "fizz" as well as annoying midrange frequencies to which the ear is sensitive. Even then, that filtered tone isn't something you could listen to via hi-fi equipment or record directly; it is amplified into certain kinds of cabinets with certain kinds of speakers. After all that, some people still hate it. :)
Side note - I have a hunch that the term “warm” was coined unconsciously. It’s not the actual sound; it’s the sound characteristic of warm glowing tubes, the sound of electricity fizzing through hot metal.
The equivalent all tube amp would require a line of credit from the bank, and would need to be on wheels.
To inject pleasing tube distortion into it, which I could turn on and off easily, I could put two inexpensive tube pedals in front of its inputs, like these:
https://www.amazon.com/TC-Electronic-Tube-Overdrive-Pilot/dp...
Not really, and it isn't just warmth. The distortion is a unique pattern of simple and monotonically decaying series of harmonics, dominated by moderate levels of second harmonic. This is probably why most find it pleasing.
Note that a solid-state amp can still be analog, transistors vs. tubes is distinct from analog vs. digital. Analog solid-state amps can make fantastic sounds, but transistors are much better at staying linear until they clip, so the transitions to nonlinearity/distortion are abrupt and the crunchy tone is less “warm”.
With tubes, I think would hold even if the tubes themselves became cheap as chips.
Time is another one: simply using the same piece of gear for years can imbue it with the power of ritual. Many writers use the same kind of paper and pen, and sit at the same sea, and the repetition alone is enough to summon the write mental state.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvAovXWLq8Q6VITKAB_Rjww
I found it pretty fascinating and watched them all in one night.
Wired wrote about him back in January.
I'm now of the strong opinion that there is NO need for tubes any more, unless you've got old gear you want to keep working, and are willing to fork over the money for the tubes, and the power they waste as heat.
It makes me sad, I've been learning how to repair old tube ham gear (Collins, et al) from a friend who's been doing it since he was a kid in the 1950s. I've learned to have strong contempt for silver mica capacitors, and a reverence for the silence of modern non-dynamotor power supplies.
The strangest case was the RF amplifier that didn't work... because the ground lug the grid was connected to, wasn't a good ground.
Yet some people still buy actual pianos. Because there's an art and craft and history to pianos, and they're majestic, slightly intimidating machines; and they're expensive status symbols. A tube amp for a guitar is much the same.
... what the power amplifier and speakers that you can afford then forbid.
You will simply not re-create the sound that a real piano creates in a room with a digital signal, going into some amp and pair of ordinary speakers.
I've made it a point to attend classical music concerts, and even I think that 0.1% might be pushing it when it comes to the piano sounds I've heard in a room.
I've got nice flat-response studio monitors so I could get a close enough room sound if I wanted (not that I could play a piano worth a damn in order to do that LOL). Honestly they weren't particularly expensive. Certainly less expensive than a single piano tuning!
All of that is condensed into a single voltage signal and sent to a speaker.
A speaker is also a 3D object; it has various modes of vibration. With multiple speakers in a cabinet (even with just a mono signal, not talking about stereo), and reflections from walls and so on, you can hear different things in the 3D space.
These are not related; the speaker cabinet just won't reproduce the experience of playing a piano, or being right next to one. It reproduces its own sonic 3D signature.
Now if you're listening to a piano from a distance in a big hall, some of this matters less. Your head movements don't make much of a difference; it's almost just coming from a single point that could be represented by a single point source (one mic capture), panned into a stereo sound stage.
However: 99.9% of all piano music heard is not heard through a live piano directly. Make that several more nines if you're talking about someone who doesn't even play piano and occasionally hears something in a huge audience hall. It's heard recorded, and then played through a speaker.
Then let's say I want to play. If I'm trying to match something I've heard, it doesn't even make sense to take that physical piano into account. What I heard was a recording. I lose nothing by playing it out of a speaker.
If I want to play just for the joy of playing a physical object or something, that's a different story. But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that, the speaker loses nothing. And best of all? It's light and cheap!
That's obviously false for the individual who is a life-long, dedicated pianist, who listens to the piano in front of him or her for hours, daily, more than any other piano.
They would be short-changed by some piano synthesizer patch coming out of a pair of speakers.
> But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that,
In particular: the purpose of creating a quality recorded sound without the hassle of an acoustic space, with excellent microphones, placed expertly, going into quality preamps, and all that.
Synthesized and modeled sound makes it easier to produce (or fake, depending on your viewpoint) quality recorded music.
Although to be fair, most of the time “liking the sound” is indeed just due to quirks of the analog implementations, like eq cramping. Those differences were emulated long ago, and producers often do reach for a “colored” emulation instead of the “ideal” digital filter.
(Ears hear only binaural phase effects. If the phase doesn't change when you turn your head, it is not relevant.)
About phasing issues, it is not usually the path-difference between your two ears, but harmonic interference due to mixing the phased signals, which cancels out desirable frequencies.
Although I do have another excellent Dan Worrall video for you, about the ears thing: https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8
These things are highly labor intensive to make and producing tubes with a consistent level of quality requires extreme attention to parts tolerances and procedure. Do you buy tubes or are you just opining on something you have no experience with? I would kill to be able to get a pair of good 300Bs for 100$