gofar99 Messages: 1949 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, Well designed tube amps are just fine and have the versitility of being able to change the brand and often type of tubes used. This allows a lot of customization of the sound as the different brands and types sound different. SS amps can not generally do this type of swapping. Well designed tube amps are no more prone to failure than SS ones and unfortunately many of the newer SS amps are rather poorly constructed overseas. Cheaper for sure, better not IMO. The reason that tube amps are common is IMO pretty simple, they do what musicians want done. Most gigs are in relatively small areas and tube amps do great there. In huge venues a common practice is to use a tube head amp to get the sound you want and feed it to a bank of powerful SS amps to get the sound level needed. Since the SS amps are rather linear unless over driven (sounds really bad then) it is a good marriage.