As a longtime bass player looking to get back into playing guitar (as in, I already know how to play guitar and still have an acoustic, but want to add an electric), I was browsing amplifiers on Musician’s Friend to see what’s out there these days. I stumbled across this thing here:
$1,699 for a 10-watt amp. Say what? 10 watts sounds like a practice amp to me.
I looked through the description and specs, trying to find an explanation for this, so I’m either completely missing something, or my first impression was correct, that this is a boutique amp for collectors with too much money to spend.
a lot of the very high end guitars , effects. amps ,etc are bought by people who have a lot of money but only play music for fun. People like Drs, lawyers, hedge fund guys and so on. I played a $20k acoustic guitar in a store, it was hand made in Hawaii. It had a lot of fancy pearl inlays on it . the store owner told me to play it , he was pretty certain I was not buying it. We had a local guitar store that sold high end stuff go belly up and a lot of people were screwed out of money. He sold online too all over the US
This isn’t so very unusual. That amp is probably hand wired which is pricey. And guitar amps aren’t bass amps; a bass amp needs ginormous headroom which means lotsa watts; a guitar amp, especially if it’s mic’d for recording or live performance, doesn’t need high wattage at all. And wattage on a tube amp can be quite a misleading indicator of volume. Here is a 12 watt Fender amp, a replica of a 1957 Fender Deluxe (called by most a “tweed” Deluxe) for $2000. I own one, and it is far, far louder than you’d expect, peel-paint-off-the-wall loud, so much so that I had to buy a power soak to play it comfortably at home.
And if you want to talk pricey boo-teak amps, behold the Dumble Overdrive Special, which can go for up to $150k. Ebay listing. $1699 for an amp is nothing.
Yeah, I know about the difference in wattage requirements between guitar and bass amps, but the rest of your info is enlightening. I’ve had 10-15w guitar amps in the past that weren’t loud at all, but those were solid state. I didn’t know that tubes made a huge difference in volume.
Yeah, solid state needs like 5-10x the number of watts to sound as loud as a tube amp, though it varies a lot between tube amps. I’d say my Custom Deluxe 12 watt tube amp is maybe twice as loud as my Blues Jr 15 watt tube amp. And I have a Peavey 20-watt tube head that’s nowhere near as loud as the other two. Meanwhile I have a 100 watt Fender Mustang solid state amp that just about keeps up with the 15 watt Blues Jr.
I have a 30 watt tube guitar amp and it is way louder than you would expect.
Many big name artists don’t buy the high end stuff even though they could afford it or even get it free. Many of them use basic Fender, Gibson, Martin, Taylor, etc stuff.
Nearly all practice Amps are switchable from 1W to 5W or 10W. 1W is great for practicing in the bedroom. 5W or 10W is great for jamming with your beer buddies in the living room.
You can get a really nice practice Amp for under $300.
I would not even consider blowing $1700.
A amatuer wouldn’t get any benefit from a hand wired tube amp. John Mayer would hear and enjoy the enhanced tone. You have to play extremely well to appreciate it.
OP, low wattage tube amps are also useful in a different, and fact the opposite way that high wattage amps are useful for bass: intentionally less headroom. You’d mostly buy a high wattage tube amp these if you wanted boucoup headroom to play clean, while still getting that classic tube ‘warmth’. A low watt tube amp could get the amp cooking hard at reasonable volume. That’s why you see switchable power output on small amps; it’s basically a ‘dirty’ switch. Put a mic in front of that bad boy and press record.*
*This assumes an all-tube design. There’s certainly amps (which I would call practice amps for the most part) with a tube preamp and a solid state, switchable, output stage. Blackstar is one brand that does this on their lower end.
you can buy a transistor amp with software that makes it sound a lot like a tube amp. Or you can use an external stomp box to get close to that sound. But many people won’t buy anything other than a real tube amp. Or as they say in the UK, a valve amp. Most tubes now are made in Russia or Eastern Europe. Fender amps use one type of tube but Marshall use a different type so you will see it called Fender/USA sound vs. Marshall/UK sound.
For the most part this stuff (called amp modeling) isn’t quite there, but it is getting better slowly. As I said, I own a modeling amp (Fender Mustang) that’s not at all a bad approximation of a tube sound, but there’s really nothing like the real thing. Fender has a new line called ToneMaster that I’d be interested in seeing in person; it is supposedly a very realistic simulation of a Fender blackface 60’s combo, which is one gold standard for vintage amps.
The Marshall / Fender difference is in the power tubes. Everybody uses the same preamp tubes these days: 12ax7/ECC83 (same tube). That said, Marshall bases their designs off of a tweaked version of the Fender Bassman 50’s circuit, so there’s genetic lineage between them
when I was a kid TVs had tubes and some stores that sold tubes had tube testers you could use to see if you needed a new tube. We had a 19 inch B&W tube TV that lasted about 20 years .
Same here. K-mart IIRC and definitely Radio Shack had tube testers. We had a 13" B&W TV for many years. I first lived with a color TV when I was 15 in 1977.
I don’t play much anymore and I was never very good but when I was really into it I had a good job, no debt, tiny house payment and could buy whatever gear I wanted. The last thing I bought was a Carr Mercury. It’s an 8 watt boutique amp, hand wired, best of everything component-wise. $2300 bucks. It has a built in attenuator and you can dial it down to 1/10 watts. Even at that level it is louder than you’d think. The idea is that you can get all the dynamics of a cranked big amp but at manageable volumes. I found the .5W setting to be all I needed around the house. I don’t regret buying it at all. That amp and one of my Strats will be the last of my musical instruments to go.
Carr amps are made about 20 miles from my house. We also have a local place that makes very high end stereo equipment and some of those amps use tubes.
Ha, this thread inspired me to pick up a guitar and play a little for the first time in at least a year. I need to trim my fingernails! They never would have gotten this long when I was playing a lot, back in the day. The DA-5 fired up on batteries that must be 5 yrs old at least.
