There are many many digital tube amp emulations and they are widely used.
But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on.
There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse.
I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work.
Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.
Your comment made me think of Jim Lill, a professional guitar player out of Nashville. He has a whole YouTube series where he tries to figure out where guitar tone comes from.
I figured his youtube series would show up here. Take my Upvote.
I'm now of the strong opinion that there is NO need for tubes any more, unless you've got old gear you want to keep working, and are willing to fork over the money for the tubes, and the power they waste as heat.
It makes me sad, I've been learning how to repair old tube ham gear (Collins, et al) from a friend who's been doing it since he was a kid in the 1950s. I've learned to have strong contempt for silver mica capacitors, and a reverence for the silence of modern non-dynamotor power supplies.
The strangest case was the RF amplifier that didn't work... because the ground lug the grid was connected to, wasn't a good ground.
That magical thinking only works, though, if the object in question is special in some way. If it can be had for a dime a dozen at any time from any local corner store, the object loses its magic.
Exactly my point. If tubes still were, and always had been, a dime a dozen, then nobody would care about building (or buying) fancy expensive equipment with tubes! Tubes would be seen as obsolete junk.
“Warm tone” is just another name for gentler distortion, where non-linearities happen before the hard clip limit. It can be modeled pretty well digitally as long as the digital signal itself doesn’t clip, but I agree the real thing is best.
LOL, what? Tubes produce the distortion you hear in most branches of heavy metal, and iconic sounds throughout the whole spectrum of guitar rock.
In its raw form, it sounds awful; it has to be carefully shaped by filters, to remove high frequency "fizz" as well as annoying midrange frequencies to which the ear is sensitive. Even then, that filtered tone isn't something you could listen to via hi-fi equipment or record directly; it is amplified into certain kinds of cabinets with certain kinds of speakers. After all that, some people still hate it. :)
Not really, and it isn't just warmth. The distortion is a unique pattern of simple and monotonically decaying series of harmonics, dominated by moderate levels of second harmonic. This is probably why most find it pleasing.
I think you're talking about very small amounts of it there. As the tube circuit goes into deeper saturation with more gain, it quickly becomes very brittle and displeasing. What keeps the harmonics moderate is low-pass filtering.
I love my tube stereo. It would take an expensive solid-state amp to get close to its character, and it glows like a little fireplace :)
Side note - I have a hunch that the term “warm” was coined unconsciously. It’s not the actual sound; it’s the sound characteristic of warm glowing tubes, the sound of electricity fizzing through hot metal.
For a few hundred bucks, second hand, I can get a distortion-free sound-reinforcement amplifier, that can pump something like 600W per channel into a 4 Ohm load.
The equivalent all tube amp would require a line of credit from the bank, and would need to be on wheels.
To inject pleasing tube distortion into it, which I could turn on and off easily, I could put two inexpensive tube pedals in front of its inputs, like these:
My stereo is 15 watts (through the tubes, but still) - RIP your ears. Agreed that circuits in the preamp stage make the vast majority of the difference.
I like analog hardware mostly because of the knobs, but there is also a nice spiritual connection to the sound energy.
Note that a solid-state amp can still be analog, transistors vs. tubes is distinct from analog vs. digital. Analog solid-state amps can make fantastic sounds, but transistors are much better at staying linear until they clip, so the transitions to nonlinearity/distortion are abrupt and the crunchy tone is less “warm”.
Rarity is one aspect that can summon that talismanic belief, but not the only one. There are lots of guitarists who have an abiding love of Stratocasters despite them being the Wonder Bread of guitars. What they have instead is a connection to history and other shamanic players: many famous guitarists have played strats, so even though your strat isn't the one Stevie Ray Vaughan played, it is sort of the same species in the underlying animistic magical thinking.
With tubes, I think would hold even if the tubes themselves became cheap as chips.
Time is another one: simply using the same piece of gear for years can imbue it with the power of ritual. Many writers use the same kind of paper and pen, and sit at the same sea, and the repetition alone is enough to summon the write mental state.
But when it comes to music and audio, there's a lot of subjectivity and magical thinking and some people believe that the real thing is better than a digital emulation. Whether they're objectively right is an open question, but they believe it enough for it to be worth spending money on.
There's another aspect to this which is the creative spark itself. If you've ever tried to do something creative, you know it can be really hard to summon the right headspace to get your emotions out into some tangible form. It takes a weird, tenuous mix of confidence and vulnerability to make it happen. It's really easy for that delicate psychological balance to collapse.
I think for a lot of musicians, certain gear has a talismanic ability to help them preserve the mental state they need to create. Now, you could argue that this is all just placebo affect. But in this case, the entire goal is to create a certain mental self-confidence, so the placebo effect is reality. When belief is the point, if you believe it works, it actually does work.
Tube amps are one of those things that helps some people connect with their muse.