As a guitarist with over 30 years of playing, and owner of many tube and non-tube amps, I disagree. Even experienced guitarist cannot reliably distinguish between transistor and tube circuits in a blind test. Having said that, if only the knowledge of playing a tube amp gives someone a better experience, even if its not empirically distinguishable, thats a perfectly valid reason to prefer it.

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utopcell 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Minor correction:

An experienced guitarist cannot distinguish between "captured" amps, or amps which at their core simulate vacuum tubes at the software level. I definitely can't tell the two apart. However, I believe it is easy to distinguish a pure vacuum tube-based circuit from a JFET/MOSFET-based one.

There do exist vacuum tube replacements like the AMT 12AX7WS [1] or Jet City's RetroVales [2], but I would argue that the fact that they try to emulate tubes via transistors is a strong indicator that the natural circuits for both sound distinct enough for guitarists.

[1] https://amtelectronics.com/new/amt-12ax7ws/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190803060713/http://www.robert...

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not who you are responding to, but I'd say the point I was making wasn't that the sound wasn't different (though, the differences are almost certainly not large enough that most people can tell the difference). But rather that if that exact sound profile is desirable, it's easy to reproduce with transistors alone.

The two products you list are proof of that.

	▲	utopcell 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I see your point, though strictly speaking, the two products I mentioned mimic 12AX7 tubes, which are preamp tubes. I'm not aware of E2E designs that also mimic power tubes.