I habe owned, Marshalls, Fenders and Mesa Boogies.
Lol when you asked all the questipns above like,
"real" tube amp sound"
The sound of listening to a guitar amp from various listening positions ?
The sound of a mic'd up guitar cab played back through a house PA system ?
The sound of a tube amp ran through an attenuator so it has a line out signal, either with or without a speaker emulation ?
My answer is yes to all of the above, a real tube amp sound.
A real tube amp just has rhat sound. And you know what The hell I am talking about.
I know that the Fractal Audio prpducts have it in them. I am just looking for advice to help me find it. I have been uses to plug and play with tweaking the amp and some pedals. The Axe Fx is a hell of alot deeper and has all the amps and effecrs A guitarist would ever dream of. I do turn up the sag I have heard but have not yet tried just using 1/4 into the mixer instead of xlr's. We are not a big tour band we are a 2x a month band. We mainly play classic rock, i do like older metal as well.
Okay, since you've owned so many amps and are something of an expert with regards to what a tube amp is supposed to sound like, please indulge me to what this unmistakable sound is that a Mesa, Fender and Marshall all share ?
See, I've owned lots of amps too, both tube and a few solid state ones like a JC120 and some mid 90's Randalls (Used to be a big Dimebag Darrell fan) and I've found there is no one "tube amp" sound, so I'm curious what this magical tone your hearing in your head actually is.
My experience with tube amps as a whole (I feel like an angle choir should sing in the background when I type the mythical work "tube" lol) is that they all sound very, very different, from amp to amp, and especially with regards to how I listened to the amp
I remember my first time going into a studio and laying down guitar tracks. I had my rig dialed in perfectly, or so I thought, because the sound I used to hear when jamming sounded NOTHING like the tone I was hearing through the studio's playback system. See, a guitar amp, tube or otherwise, sounds very very different if your standing in front of a speaker cab, especially with an open back cab like I used to use, and usually heard in a pretty small room.
So the sound of a mic'd guitar and the sound of an amp when your standing in front of it sound very different.... thus the million "amp in room threads" we've had.
Moving on, I used to run products like a Power Brake, Hot Plate, Weber MASS and other attentuators back when I was still using amps. Just couldn't handle the volume otherwise, and I tried a variety of cab emulators like a HK Redbox, Palmer etc. Found that my amps sounded, and felt very different when I could really crank them a fair bit, compared to the levels I often had to play at. I had a JCM800 2204 and really never was allowed to dime it at any venue I played (they were small places) and it sure responded differently when I did run the PowerBrake and had a chance to dime it at a buddies rehearsal space.
So point two is tube amps can sound very different depending on how your able to use them, and most venues these days often have some volume limits.
Additionally, when I owned attenuators with a line out, and used a RedBox it was rather different than the sound of mic'ing the real cabinet, but of course they made recording at home A LOT easier, but still they sounded different
Long story short, tube amps do not have one unique sound, and how I think a tube amp sounds, based on how I use mine, verses how you think an amp sounds, based on what and where you play yours can be very different things.
Thus my original post and questions of what does a tube amp sound like ? How are you running your rig ? Are you used to how your amp sounds when your standing in front of it or have you been recording/mic'ing cabs for years and have a dialed in mic placement and type of mic your used to using ?
Also, keep in mind sound and feel are two different things. I've had vst software that can sound like a given amp (again, a recorded/mic'd amp) but it had no feel or dynamics. Axe-Fx has feel and dynamics....
So now that we can hopefully both get on the same page with regards to what in your experience its supposed to sound like, and what you want it to sound like, steps can be taken to help you get there