Once this guy came round to fix something in the house. I wasnt there at the time but apparently he played guitar and was going on about how much he wanted my amp and was wondering if he could buy it off me. All it was, was a 30watt marshall mg :)
By virtue of their electrical properties, tubes generate a special waveform when they're saturated, which is why tube engineering has tremendous tonal advantages over solid state or DSP solutions, particularly for crunch and lead sounds. Tubes enter the saturation zone gradually or softly, which lends tube-driven tone its trademark yet totally unique character.