April Birthdays 
DeathTide wrote:
Heh. I was speaking tongue-in-cheek. I think the preamp tubes make a difference, and in my (very) limited experience not so much power tubes. I swapped a set of JJs for a set of NOS RCA 6L6GCs (from Brent’s) and I honestly heard no difference. Then I swapped some preamp tubes and it changed a bit, a little. Brighter but in a rich non-screechy way. This was in a SFTR. The best sounding blackface Twin I’ve got (out of three) has Groove Tubes!
I really didn’t have much of an idea about this stuff before, but now I don’t really feel the need to shell out big bucks for power tubes. I love having a tiny cache of old preamp tubes.
One thing many do say which I believe are a benefit to NOS tunes, is that they will most likely last much longer, especially if they are actual NOS tubes.
I follow you, now. I would say that tubes make a difference when they make a difference, but not otherwise. There’s no magic in old tubes; there were plenty of duds back in the day. I have a set of Groove Tube new production 6L6s in my TRRI, the ones that are built to spec of older RCA tubes, and they are fantastic. It’s a great sounding Twin and the tube replacement helped, but only because the OEM tubes were not all that well matched. I would opine that the two tubes out of that quartet which are perfectly matched would sound great in my Winfield Elizabeth.
The biggest problem in all of this is that we hear and judge based upon our momentary impression. It’s subjective, and doesn’t really mean all that much. On a different day, we might arrive at different conclusions. When Western Electric was learning to measure sound, they played samples, taking the aggregate response from large groups of test subjects and were able to find truth in these. No one individual’s response was meaningful, because there are too many variables. A hiccup, a yawn or a momentary lapse of attention was enough to render an individual’s response meaningless for all, or part of a test.
I once had a student that went through conniptions trying to get his Tele sorted out. He was actually referred to me by the repairman that had tired of chasing ghosts and convinced this player that maybe the variability he heard from his guitar came from his technique, and not any flaw of the guitar. I could see the same sort of thing happening with an amp. Our senses love to play tricks on us.
—The artist formerly known as: Synchro
When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.
