If people only liked the sound, I would assume that it could be emulated on the digital sound processing platform they already use. People buying tubes must be something else.
Although to be fair, most of the time “liking the sound” is indeed just due to quirks of the analog implementations, like eq cramping. Those differences were emulated long ago, and producers often do reach for a “colored” emulation instead of the “ideal” digital filter.
(Ears hear only binaural phase effects. If the phase doesn't change when you turn your head, it is not relevant.)
About phasing issues, it is not usually the path-difference between your two ears, but harmonic interference due to mixing the phased signals, which cancels out desirable frequencies.
Although I do have another excellent Dan Worrall video for you, about the ears thing: https://youtu.be/uZ9WQDojQt8
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.
I'm not saying it's not nostalgia, it could very well be....
A naive view point is that the analog output of an analog device is going to be smooth.
The digital output will add noise on the stair step transitions.
I'm not saying this is the case in reality. I'm just saying, it's useful to think about when dealing with analog vs digital signals.
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. :)
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.
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:
https://www.amazon.com/TC-Electronic-Tube-Overdrive-Pilot/dp...
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.
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”.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvAovXWLq8Q6VITKAB_Rjww
I found it pretty fascinating and watched them all in one night.
Wired wrote about him back in January.
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.
The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less.
Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
The mistake with most solid state guitar amps is that they have similar wattages to tube amps. At stage volumes, it's easy for a measly 50 or 100W thing to go into clipping.
If you want solid-state guitar amplification, skip guitar amps and use a high wattage power amp used for sound reinforcement. E.g. something that puts out like 800W or more into a 4 Ohm load. This will have the headroom not to crap out when competing with the other guitarist's 100W head.
Not only that, but it will cost you less $$$ (particularly in the second hand market), and likely weigh less than your friend's 100W tube head.
Solid state guitar amps from guitar amp companies are snake oil, basically. They are not representative of what you can do with solid state.
Did you know Eddie Van Halen used solid state amps? One thing he did was to use a Marhsall tube amp head as a giant guitar pre-amp: capture the speaker output, reduced to line level, and re-amplify with a power amp, like a H&H V800.
Yet some people still buy actual pianos. Because there's an art and craft and history to pianos, and they're majestic, slightly intimidating machines; and they're expensive status symbols. A tube amp for a guitar is much the same.
... what the power amplifier and speakers that you can afford then forbid.
You will simply not re-create the sound that a real piano creates in a room with a digital signal, going into some amp and pair of ordinary speakers.
I've made it a point to attend classical music concerts, and even I think that 0.1% might be pushing it when it comes to the piano sounds I've heard in a room.
I've got nice flat-response studio monitors so I could get a close enough room sound if I wanted (not that I could play a piano worth a damn in order to do that LOL). Honestly they weren't particularly expensive. Certainly less expensive than a single piano tuning!
All of that is condensed into a single voltage signal and sent to a speaker.
A speaker is also a 3D object; it has various modes of vibration. With multiple speakers in a cabinet (even with just a mono signal, not talking about stereo), and reflections from walls and so on, you can hear different things in the 3D space.
These are not related; the speaker cabinet just won't reproduce the experience of playing a piano, or being right next to one. It reproduces its own sonic 3D signature.
Now if you're listening to a piano from a distance in a big hall, some of this matters less. Your head movements don't make much of a difference; it's almost just coming from a single point that could be represented by a single point source (one mic capture), panned into a stereo sound stage.
However: 99.9% of all piano music heard is not heard through a live piano directly. Make that several more nines if you're talking about someone who doesn't even play piano and occasionally hears something in a huge audience hall. It's heard recorded, and then played through a speaker.
Then let's say I want to play. If I'm trying to match something I've heard, it doesn't even make sense to take that physical piano into account. What I heard was a recording. I lose nothing by playing it out of a speaker.
If I want to play just for the joy of playing a physical object or something, that's a different story. But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that, the speaker loses nothing. And best of all? It's light and cheap!
That's obviously false for the individual who is a life-long, dedicated pianist, who listens to the piano in front of him or her for hours, daily, more than any other piano.
They would be short-changed by some piano synthesizer patch coming out of a pair of speakers.
> But if I'm playing for a purpose other than that,
In particular: the purpose of creating a quality recorded sound without the hassle of an acoustic space, with excellent microphones, placed expertly, going into quality preamps, and all that.
Synthesized and modeled sound makes it easier to produce (or fake, depending on your viewpoint) quality recorded music.