I've been playing since 1960. My first amp was a Hohner 50w tube. At that time I did not pay much attention to what was in an amp or not. There wasn't a whole lot of solid state amps anyway. Since then I have built my own or modified old tube amps to fit my needs. One day a while back I was going thru a copy of a spec sheet on an old PA amp that a middle school was using for a PA system in their gym. Then I looked at my old Dynaco 70 amp manual and others from that time period and compared the specs to old guitar tube amps. What I found was that up to a certain loudness level the older units were designed like hi-fi and stereo units. They were transparent until you got the amp into distortion. Usually at a volume level of 5-7 depending on the unit. The harmonic and crossover distortion specs were the same. My old PA amp had 6L6's in them but the output was only 25 watts. Same with an old RCA hi-fi bi-amp system. one 6V6 and 2 6V6's. Power was 8 watts. The bias was set pretty cold. Increase the volume and you could get a nice sweet overdrive. If you continued on you eventually got distortion and then bad distortion. I installed a master volume on these tube amps basically to overdrive the power amp. I integrated it in the phase inverter so it's not post or pre master. Pre-amp distortion and power amp distortion or I should say overdrive sound very different. The older transistor amps while acting like tubes were still handy capped by the fact that the signal was being processed thru a crystalline type matrix. A tube amp does not have the signal go thru a tube. So the amplifying device has no direct effect on your signal. New DSP type modeling amps are the same as old solid state devices except everything is crammed together into a tighter structure.
If you like the sound of what your producing fine. The brown sound can be emulated. This is just the output stage driving hard enough to sink enough current to lower the voltage at the plate of the tubes. I have found that when a solid state device goes from a soft saturation to distortion it is very sudden and instantly sounds bad. A tube just does this slower. I read a test result of Audiophiles at a sound test. It was found that they all like the tube amp sound and to their surprise their comfort zone for the music was at or just after the amp started to clip. Bass and PA amps are a different story. I like those transparent. What I put in I want the same out. Keyboards, too. My amps are tone machines. An electric guitar is half the equation, your amp is the other half.
Regards, G1619T
