Originally Posted by: stacknyIve heard the words "tube amp" a lot lately. WTF is it and how is it different from a regular amp?

Wow.


A tube amp is a regular amplifier just that happens to use vacume tubes, or valves as the brits call 'em. Have you ever seen an antique radio or telivision? They used to be powered by tubes, but transitors came along and made it cheaper and more reliable to manufacture these products, and the same happened with amplifiers. Some people (engineers) thought it would make sense to build amplifiers using these new gadgets that could replace tubes and would be reliable....and it does make sense on paper, just not in real life. What the egineers didn't acoount for was the quality of "sound", which of course is very subjective.

I would recomend you go to a music store and compare solid state(transistor) amplifiers to all tube amplifiers. Use the same guitar and the same settings on the different amplifiers....I think you will notice a difference in the quality of sound.

Somebody else please help explain this further, as I'm not sure that this is a satisfactory explanation........