Tube amp is like a vintage muscle car, seems really cool to own one. There is a certain romanatism about them, a certain pureness, image etc.
I’ve had many a friend who thought they could make one their daily driver. Quickly they found they missed the economy, reliability, safety, and comfort of a modern car. This was before vintage cars got as expensive as they are now too mind you.
Amazing how you miss reliable starting, traction control, working defrosters etc on a cold day when your running late to work lol
Tube amps are often the same; you find you can’t crank the volume, then you add more and more pedals to give some break up at low volume, and then you miss tap tempo on your delay so then you add additional pedals, and cost, and board size, and then you need more power supplies and cabling and you’ve got this huge rig, costs tons of money, and it still sounds like an amp with the volume on 1.5 because that’s all the louder you can get.
I’ve got a Princeton still, sounds great for one thing, and that is clean with reverb and tremolo, using neck and middle pickup on my strat. Does that sound fantastic and at a modest volume. Anything else ? Wrong amp for the job.
Muscle cars are awesome if you’ve got a spare garage space and can keep one for pleasure driving, just like having a few real amps is fun to mess around with, but whole different issue when it comes down to living with them.
Just as guys say “oh I actually enjoy working on my car”, when the reality comes around of how much you have to do it, they suddenly don’t enjoy it as much, maintaining tube amps is the same way. You start to see them as money pits and wish you could just turn soemthing on anytime and just have it work, just like having a modern car that doesn’t need anything for like 10k miles or more. Just add gas as needed and drive it, maybe wash once in a while.
When the car shows are in town I always think “I want to buy another one” after seeing a nice GTO drive pass, but then when I see a dozen on the side of the highway, waiting on service, I think “oh yeah, my Elantra is pretty sweet” lol.
There is a reason so many folks have moved to modelers, not the reverse, just as there was a reason we moved away from late 60’s/early 70’s automotive tech.