GreatGreen
Power User
A power amp is a power amp. Having tubes should not change the tone. No one would pass a blind test.
I used to think this too, but the more testing I did, the more I learned and understood, and my thinking ended up changing pretty drastically.
Power sections are extremely important and influential to the sound of a guitar. Tubes, transformers, damping, negative feedback… all of it matters and all of it impacts tone. If it didn’t, there would be no need for more than one type of power tube, transformer, or power amp circuit for that matter to exist. I think the thing guitar players lose sight of here is that they think because poweramps have minimal parameters for adjustment, there must be minimal aspects of the tone they impact. This is inaccurate.
Power sections dictate more than just EQ. Transients, compression, bloom, overdrive characteristics, all of this is determined by the power section.
Even solid state amps impact tone between different models in ways besides slightly different EQ signatures. Power available for sustained wattage output vs transient bursts, etc. And that’s not even to mention the oddball solid state amps like some Peavey amps that have solid state power sections with transformers.
All of it matters.
Personally my favorite tube poweramp is the VHT (now Fryette) 2/90/2, and my favorite solid state poweramp is the Matrix GT1000FX 2U. They’re the biggest, boldest, clearest sounding poweramps I’ve ever tried. I’ve owned the VHT for close to 15 years and it’s always performed flawlessly, and I’ve owned the Matrix for a year or so and I’m totally satisfied with it. They sound and feel slightly different from each other but they’re both absolutely excellent and I could be totally happy with either one, especially with a modeler like the Axe-FX that is so good at emulating various power section types.
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