Quote:
Originally Posted by bugly
...However to take advantage of the tube sound you need to drive the amp hard ie its damn load, great if you are playing in a concert hall but shite if you play casualy at home and you want to retain cordial relations with your neighbors (esp if you play as umm badly as me)...
|
There's the crux of it right there. Tube amps sound best when you can crank them up to where you're driving the power tubes instead of just the preamp tubes. For most home players, that's not a reality - even a 5W tube amp is pretty doggone loud when you get it into its "sweet spot"....plenty loud enough to annoy everybody else in your house and your neighbors too! A good solid-state modeling amp will do a fine job of getting a nice overdriven sound at tolerable volumes for home practice...it won't sound exactly like a good tube amp being pushed into natural overdrive, but close enough.
Raff, I'm assuming that you're talking about home practice/playing, as opposed to gigging or jamming with a band. Unless you have a big practice space, lots of soundproofing and/or very tolerant neighbors and family members, a tube amp and 4x10 cab is going to be
way overkill for that purpose. You'll either make a lot of enemies, or spend all your time with the volume knob set at about 1-2, wondering where all that warm, luscious "tube sound" is (hint: it's up above '5' or so on that volume knob). You can use a distortion pedal to get your 'dirt', but that's still not the wonderful tube overdrive you paid all that money for.
I have three tube amps - a 15W combo with a 12" speaker, a 22W combo with a 12" speaker and an 18W head/cab with 2-10" speakers. Any of them are far too loud to crank up into their "sweet spot" at home for practice, and plenty loud enough to bury my drummer when jamming with him in a small practice space if I turn them up. At home, I spend much more time plugged into my Roland Micro Cube or Vox AD30VT than any of the above amps. I can get the sounds I want at tolerable volume levels and avoid making enemies of all my neighbors.
As far as the question about maintenance - you will have to replace the tubes in a tube amp once in a while, and if it's not a self-biasing (cathode-biased) amp you should have a tech set the bias when changing power tubes. Solid-state amps require no maintenance other than normal care (i.e. not exposing them to liquids, not abusing them, etc.)