jin1995x
Inspired
power tubes on real amps are often re- biased(90% of them , unless cathode biased). and probably some more stuff under the hood is tweaked.A few years back when I owned a Diezel Einstein 100w head, I experimented a lot with different tubes.
I could clearly hear the difference between different 12ax7 brands (EV vs JJ vs Sovtek,...)
Changing power tubes between 6l6, 6550, KT77, 6ca7 also made a noticeable difference.
In the Axe, I can't tell the difference. I wonder if this is a volume thing ?
The Diezel was usually set very loud.
When you tweak on an axe, afaik it changes not everything but some stuff under the hood (to make it sound like how it would on the amp if done correctly by normalising it for Transformer ratios etc) it loads the knee voltage/hardness which you can use to help it clip earlier or later
tweak around some advanced parameters on different tubes you will get variable results.
The virtual transformer is changed on axe to keep the matching same when changing tubes, unlike real world
The differences in real world often arise due to different setups by different technicians .
The other thing is real amps are often biased cold (to avoid warranty claims) so even for like for like tube replacements the bias is changed to hotter by the amp tech, as a result it sounds much different.
Not really a volume thing, but as cliff said earlier , higher mv can help you hear the differences in them more well, because you need to drive the poweramp
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