The VOX AC30S1 is a Hybrid amp if you care

There's an Aussie bloke that presents the Youtube channel EEVBlog that claims a valve is just a FET with a pilot lamp anyway. Nothing wrong with a well designed FET circuit.
MOSFET amps underwent a vogue a few years ago. I built plenty ( bass, Hi-Fi and PA applications ) and they sounded great. I also see the ubiquitous TL072 Op-Amps sprinkled around where they can work their magic. There are a couple of discrete transistors in there too. I can almost hear the gnashing, the wailing and the renting of garments at this

All that really matters is the sound coming from the speaker.

It's certainly an interesting approach to a hybrid.

 

Then why in blazes are they advertising it, to use their own words, as an "all tube design" and a "full tube design" on their website, including as a Main Feature?

I'll fully agree that solid state devices can be very useful for these applications, but don't lie to us and say it's something it's not, Vox.

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Vox aren't 100% truthful at times. One of their range of amplifiers can bend physics to their will to produce substantially more power than the power consumed. They aren't alone in this, but when your 60 Watt amplifier consumes 37 Watts, it may lead a customer to speculate they could buy a bank of them and create a power loop to light their house. An optimistic, massaged, best-case, following wind, downhill headline power figure looks more impressive. Big numbers sell!

The truth is what people want to believe. It does have a valve in the pre-amp. It does feature a valve phase inverter and it does feature a valve power stage, so it does have valves in all stages of the design. That's what sells.

That one valve has been omitted to drive the tone stack, and at least another + a transformer to drive and recover the reverb ( simplifying it a bit ) is merely swept under the carpet. Marketing may have a tough sell if they were honest and claimed the FET drivers, the op-amps and the discretes in the signal path.

Various types of FET are great. The TL07x op-amps are the hidden helpers of the audio world, but they don't cause folk to emote in the same way glowing, hot glass does.

Too much shenanigans.

 

A wall of amps sounds cheaper than a Tesla Powerwall. Think I'll look into that!

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Probably just doing what it takes to survive in a market where consumers with no technical experience treat "all tube" as the Holy Grail and "solid state" as the mark of the Devil.

 

Because they're liars. Just like Supro, Mesa, (and I'm sure many others) call Class A/B cathode biased amps 'Class A amps' and advertise them as such, implying as if there was some inherent superiority compared to other operation modes.

 

Sounds like the 'design' was all tube, just not the 'production'.

 

This is as I suspected. This is the bigger brother of the AC10C1 with a few new features.

I guess having at least one tube in the preamp and one tube in the power amp is good enough for Vox to call something "all tube" or "classic"

 

Are you playing these with teles?

I could never get excited about the tone from the AC10C1 or the AC30S1. Maybe teles are the other half of the magic recipe? Maybe it is proper speakers?

 

I think what we need to accept is that definitions change and evolve over time. What the purists think of as being "all tube", meaning 50+ year old designs, isn't what the modern definition of a "tube amp" is today.

I'm not arguing for or against either definition. However, it has changed.

Personally, I could not care less. If it sounds good, it is good. If it doesn't sound good to me, that doesn't mean its "bad" or "wrong", its just not for me.

 

To my knowledge, the definition of "all" hasn't changed.

Vox isn't vaguely calling it a tube amp: their own description is "All tube design featuring two 12AX7 pre-amp tubes and four EL84 power-amp tubes."

I, too, couldn't care less what's in the thing, but only if the manufacturer decides to be factual and doesn't try to manipulate me with a lie.

 

It's an amazing sounding amp for the money.

 

I wouldn't call this a hybrid... to me a hybrid is when either the PRE-AMP or POWER AMP is 100% SS... not when some SS technology is introduced as part of the design. (IMO of course)

Preamp runs through a tube...
PI is tube driven...
Power amp is tube...

This discussion is not unlike Marshalls use of clipping diodes in their pre-amps. Does that make the JCM 900 and later models hybrids?

As for whether or not VOX should be marketing them as ALL TUBE or FULL TUBE... I'm not going there. I'm just addressing the "hybrid" comment in the title.

 

Isn't it interesting how some of the same folks who complain about a tube amp having some SS components will then put a KOT, or other very expensive op-amp box, between their guitar and amp, and then gush over the "magical 3D tone" and "feel".