Comment by crtified | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crtified | Hacker News Reader

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I don't disagree with you. I just have an equal wish to state my equally valid piece on the matter :

The majority of the world's guitar players - or hobbyists if you prefer - don't play in bands (yet, or maybe ever), and it's likely - given urban realities - that most don't have regular access to a space where amplifiers can be meaningfully used. After all, you don't buy an amplifier to run it at 2.

For a lot of those people, guitar playing has a different meaning than the rock-band meme of "Fender/Gibson/Ibanez/... & Marshall/Peavey/Mesa/Fender/..., jamming penta-blues on stage with the boys" that's persisted as the carbon-copy expected setup since before The Beatles and Hendrix. That's ok. Nothing wrong with either.

And the economics of real amplifiers aren't kind to guitar players. We all have a friend whose biggest lifetime purchases consist of a long line of Holy Grail Amplifiers, the amp to end all amps, sooooo much better than all the rest... once every 4 years for the past 40.

Let alone ones from poorer economies.

I think you can have it both ways these days: have an actual amplifier and not bother with an oversized power amp which has to be saturated or attenuated. There are a lot of good preamp tube pedals, which can be then fed into headphones, mac/pc, speakers with cab simulation or a simpler solid-state poweramp into guitar cab. For me personally, this tech is much cooler than all the flawed modellers. I still have real knobs and a real amp reacting.

> There are a lot of good preamp tube pedals, which can be then fed into headphones, mac/pc, speakers with cab simulation or a simpler solid-state poweramp into guitar cab.

That hybrid setup can deliver very satisfactory sound but for some guitarists, they also want real tube power amps because they behave differently than solid-state power amps.

The tube preamps give the distortion fuzz but the tube power amps also provide the extra dynamics that makes the whole response under the fingers more spongy, velvety, etc. Connecting the preamp outputs of a Mesa Boogie or Soldano into a solid-state amp has a different feel than tube power amps. The solid-state amp is definitely usable... but it's different.

That said, I sold all my tube amps and just use the stock digital emulations of guitar amps in Logic Pro. I got rid of almost all the analog gear that was heavy and required maintenance (e.g. new replacement tubes cost $200) because I didn't want it weighing me down as I got older.

They do, but this interplay between preamp and saturated poweramp is basically unachievable in home setup due to how loud it is. Then next suggestion is then to use an attenuator or a power soak, but they also color the sound. And all this besides the cab speakers behaving differently on low volume levels anyway.

The premps I am talking about is something like Tone King Imperial preamp pedal - it is a real preamp, is compact and sounds good with any output source. Tubes in those are not expensive and hold for 10k hours, compared to tubes in poweramp sections, which also often have to be biased.

I have my small digital modeler for travel, but that is all of the use cases I have for them. They are "Ok" - that is most praise I can give to them. "Bland and uninspiring" would be a more realistic description. I have not tried expensive modellers on the level of QC, but I try to build more of my life away from screens and IT, so I am not really interested.

And both the reactivity and tone of modelers is so good now that even trained ears can have trouble distinguishing between them. In the vast majority of cases it's not a downgrade from a real amp.

Here in India we have a little explosion of youtube-trained bedroom guitarists with outstanding chops, playing live to small but dedicated audiences. Almost none of them would have been able to afford a "proper" gig amp and cab, let alone a place to practice with them.

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