What's the worst tube amp you've ever heard?

[gtrboy]

crates??

crate

some crates sound great. the vintage clubs werent bad and there was a 50 watt blue voodoo head i played through a while back that was pretty sweet. they did have some poopie sounding ones. ive modded a few. the 500h is a good platform for mods.

[Valvehead]

worst for high gain---Mesa rectos.

Flabby, flubby , and the top end sounds like a buzzy can of bees on crack .

[Steve Conner]

Well, that's all down to Randall Smith's exclusive patented Can Of Bees On Crack Simulator circuit.

[mykey]

worst for high gain---Mesa rectos.

Flabby, flubby , and the top end sounds like a buzzy can of bees on crack .

"Jet plane with asthma". whoops i quoted myself.
I still can't understand why people think a crate amp sounds good. (?)
i don't like the sound of PVs or for that matter any transistor amp.
in a blind test i put a very expensive transistor amp side by side with an old Macintosh tube amp. 100% of the customers who walked into my shop chose the tube amp. does that surprise anyone?

[Baxthorpe]

DA Graphic

Well, I think the Ampeg SVT was a zero-trick pony - but I have to comment on the Dan Armstrong Graphic hybrid amps. I bought one about 30 years ago, and it was very good value with a good sound - until the smoke came out the back. The sockets were rated too low for the B+ and it needed ceramic ones. Good design, poor specification - now you know why you don't see many about!

Another zero trick pony is the Marshall 200W plexi - you need a 100 yard guitar lead to get one cranked up!

[JJGross]

Does anyone convert cheap used solid state amps into tube amps -- or is that a lost cause?

I'm not sure, but I think you'd have to start with replacing the transformer right off the bat since most SS amps require very low voltage, but tubes want at least a couple hundred volts coming out of the trannies. Since that's the most expensive part in most amps whether it's a lost cause depends on how much money you want to sink into it. If you replace the trannies, capacitors, make a turret board for it and even consider a new cabinet, making money on doing it is probably not an option. Probably be far cheaper to buy a new tube amp.

Cheers

[mykey]

Well, I think the Ampeg SVT was a zero-trick pony - but I have to comment on the Dan Armstrong Graphic hybrid amps. I bought one about 30 years ago, and it was very good value with a good sound - until the smoke came out the back. The sockets were rated too low for the B+ and it needed ceramic ones. Good design, poor specification - now you know why you don't see many about!

Another zero trick pony is the Marshall 200W plexi - you need a 100 yard guitar lead to get one cranked up!

You know that the SVT and Marshall 200 are not so bad with some KT88s and a few other tweeks. I don't know if Ive ever seen one of those Armstrong hybrids. But we owe Armstrong who was like a pioneer, one of the founding fathers.

[mykey]

worst for high gain---Mesa rectos.

Flabby, flubby , and the top end sounds like a buzzy can of bees on crack .

yes the recto sounds like a leaking scuba tank and the studio 22 has fireworks on the circuit board (the ARCH of technology). I don't know which is worse, the mesa or the crate but they both catch on fire. (how's your insurance?)

[Enzo]

I still can't understand why people think a crate amp sounds good. (?)
i don't like the sound of PVs or for that matter any transistor amp.

The same way I can't understand how someone can lump all the models of a wide ranging product line into one lump "crap" designation. Crate makes some abysmal little cheap solid state amps, and some not so hot tube amps. On the other hand some of their amps sound prety good to me, and to many others. Just labeling them Crate tells us little.

It would be like saying General Motors cars are crap. Well that means everything from little cheap Chevettes to screaming Corvettes. Hardly alike in any way. Same with the Crate product line, they are all over the map.

And same to the PV remark. I have played any number of PV amps I didn't care for, but they make some pretty cool amps as well. ANd "or any transistor amp" seeems to imply PV amps are all solid state. Certainly not. But within their tube line, the little Classic 30, a cool amp, is NOTHING like their 5150 series of sreaming metal power, while none of those resemble the very popular Bandit models, which are solid state.

And for the record, that SVT that can be "not so bad" is a Crate product.

[Baxthorpe]

Watkins Joker

While I think about it, there was one amp that was years ahead of the others in the 60s - the Watkins Joker. That thing had more sounds than anything else on the market, and a built-in Copicat echo.
Trouble was, there was so much inside the thing that you couldn't move it without a tube coming loose or the copicat going out of line - they were so unreliable, I have known people fail auditions for owning one. If you got two gigs without the amp dying, you were doing well - and the worst-sounding amp is the one that makes no sound at all when you are standing in front of an audience!

[Steve Conner]

What's so bad about the SVT? It's really big and really loud, what more could a bassist want? I play bass in a local band and we rehearse in various practice rooms all over the city. A few of them have reissue SVTs with 8x10s, and I always get a grin when I get to play one. I just turn the preamp gain up, push in the Ultra Lo button and watch the look of misery on our singer's face. The other week I was in there myself and got the chance to crank both volumes full, which actually wasn't as loud as I thought it would be.

Although one guy I used to jam with described the sound as a "giant hamster fart" and said I should be using solid-state gear and those Hartke aluminium coned speakers.

Converting solid-state amps to tube amps isn't an option IMO. Our guitarist was nagging me to convert his Fender London Reverb for ages. But when I thought about it, I realised it would have been a case of taking out all the guts, throwing them away, and installing a fresh set of tube amp guts in the cabinet.

[Baxthorpe]

What's so bad about the SVT? Personally, I just hate the things! Designed to mate with a Rickenbacker 4001 for that one-trick sound made famous by Sir Paul MaCartney around 25 years ago -and Macca got bored with it, too.

Rebuiilding SS amps as tube amps is not a good idea, but it can be handy, if you get a cheap SS amp, to use one as the basis of a tube amp project - cheaper than building a cab and buying speakers.

[drewl]

Cheap horrible sounding 70's SS Marshall amp, about 30watts.
Looks cool with 2 blackback celestions.





Gutted:



transformed into A firebreathing 50w Plexi with switchable cascaded front end and switchable PPIMV's.

[Liam]

Now that is a very cool looking little "sleeper". 10" Celestions?

Think the worst "tube/valve" setup I ever managed to inflict on myself was a Marshall JMP1 and whatever the 9000 series 50 watt per side stereo power amp was called. The idea is that you get loads of different amp sounds in 1 box, I even MIDI'd the JMP1 to a Boss ME5. Trouble was that none of the sounds were all that good, as soon as the gain went up there was always a hint of wasp in a jam jar.

Many of my favourites are 1 trick ponies, SVT included. In the mid 90s the mode for bass players round our way was an SVT with a Stingray or a P Bass. I thought they sounded great. Favourite "one trick" amps I have owned and loved include the Vox AC30, the Marshall 2203, and a weird little Australian 6 watt thing called a Diason.

[drewl]

Nope, 2 12" blackback celestions.
I shoulda' just kept it stock and used it as a speaker cab, and in case of amp trouble the ss amp would be there as a backup.

That's what I'm going to do with the 1x12" vesion of this a friend gave me: