Wayne Parham Messages: 19101 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
I think tube amps are here to stay.
I think Rusty has a point - that business is tough - which has a huge effect on what's available. But from a technical standpoint, tube amps truly are better than solid state amps in certain specific ways.
Not knocking solid-state amps: You can make those great too, you just gotta compensate for their specific weaknesses to benefit from their strengths. They do have a lot of fantastic strengths. Size, weight and power: All those benefits can be realized from a solid-state amplifier provided you implement global feedback and ensure the amp never clips.
But tube amplifiers excel when run in certain "purist" topologies. A single-ended bipolar solid-state amplifier without global negative feedback cannot perform as well as a single-ended tube amplifier of the same topology, for example.
There are a handful of other topologies that really exploit the linearity benefits of tubes, and I think all those are here to stay because people promoting tube amps have done a good job of educating those interested in high-fidelity what these particular benefits are.
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