Quote:
Originally Posted by PennyCentury
Tube audio = even order harmonics = perceived as more musical
Transistor audio = odd order harmonics = perceived as harsh and unmusical
So it's not really our gear-head psychology, these perceptions are real and repeatable.
(that's what I'm told at any rate)
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Arghh! Let's not trot out this old fable, please. While all myths have roots in truth, this is just gross over simplification.
Nothing in tubes or transistors intrinsically produces odd or even order harmonics when distorted. The reason that tube amps behave the way they do has much more to do with the design and topology of the old designs, just as the common and practical transistor designs (especially of the past) are tethered to the practical design constraints and commercial realities of their day that in turn dictate certain behaviors.
One may certainly design a tube amp that sounds like crap when overdriven. Easy. The topologies that work well (to our ears) in tube amps do not scale to transistors, which is not to say that the transistors are "bad" - they just don't produce the same
accidental results as tubes in the same topology. You need something else.
Consider that the old tube amps we love were not designed to produce interesting distortion when overdriven; that was just a byproduct of practical designs of the '30s, '40s and '50s. Because it was an "undesigned" phenomenon, it is difficult to reverse-engineer. It is much easier to just build more tube amps using these tried-and-true topologies.
The efforts in amp simulation these days are very interesting, because they are attempting to recreate this "undesigned" musical behavior and doing so based upon empirical data. I suspect that over time they will eventually achieve this goal and others.