Tube Amps

In my past I was an electronics technician. In high school I studied radio and TV repair. The '70s were a different time for televisions. The transition from tube to transistor (say that fast) occurred while I was learning how to fix them. I did realize that the days of the TV repairman were numbered. I went into the Army and furthered my studies of electronics. The point I'm making is that I cherish the knowledge I gained from learning all about tubes. And I am happy that tubes are still used to amplify guitars.

Today's modern amps have digital circuits programmed to sound like the best tube amps in rock music. Why not just buy the real thing? There are reasons. Money is usually the reason. The components in a tube amp cost more. Physically, tubes require high voltages and that means stepping up the voltage from the AC source and isolating the voltage from the speakers. Those are handled by transformers. They do affect the sound so the transformers can go for $250 each. Putting any component costing that much into a product means that the product will be much more expensive. Weight is another reason. A 100 watt solid state combo amp weighs less than a 30 watt tube combo amp. Also, tubes blow, tube-generated heat can damage circuits, and so on.

When the early British rock guitarists discovered that the Vox AC15 could make a great sound, they took advantage of it. The Vox AC30, made in the sixties, helped the Beatles make great tone that everyone wanted. Eric Clapton took his chops and along with a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitar and a Marshall Combo Amp, his name briefly changed to 'God.' This tone became the standard and no solid-state amplifier could compete. Now the modern digital modeling amps are getting competitive but I don't think they are good enough yet.

In the nineties a friend of mine bought an old tube amp. He played it when he got it home and it didn't sound well. So he asked me to look at it after he found out that a pair of matching output tubes would cost him $100. I redesigned the output to replace those rarer tubes with more popular and lest costly tubes. I was thrilled with the challenge and the result and since then I wanted to do more. But things change and I went the other way.

Now I have the bug again. I own a current model of the Vox AC30. They stayed true to the early sixties Top-Boost model. My only problem is that I can't play it loud. I hope to get a five watt Bugera amp that also steps down in power to allow the user to saturate the tubes without blasting eardrums. I also want to build an amp that I design someday. With everything else I want to do, it will come down to where my passion takes me.

I hope that this last hurrah for tubes lasts a while.