They make a pleasant, warm sound (pleasant not accurate) when starting to go into distortion.

Which will happen at just one sweet spot volume, a bit like riding a single speed, nearly always in the wrong gear. For most of my playing I use modelling guitar amps because they sound OK at any volume. Even on stage it’s rare I play at volumes where the valve amps come into their sweet spot so use a 200e second-hand Fender Mustang which sounds fine at non-painful volumes.

Some amps have undersized power supplies but upmarket Fenders, Marshalls and Mesas have pefectly adequate transformers.

The power supply in my Fender Bassbreaker 45 head is enormous and definitely supplies more than enough clean power (the amp weighs 15kgs and tips heavily to the transformer end). The distortion comes from overdriving preamp valve gain and power amp valve gain. You can play with preamp and poweramp gain independantly so get a good feel for the colour and grain added by each set of valves for a given level of gain.

On the Marshall the different channels do have have circuits to add distortion but it’s still the saturating preamp valves and power amp valves that gives the characteristic cranked sound.

Edit: the Bassbreaker 45 is pretty much a copy of a Marshall JTM 45 but with PCBs rather than hand-wired components which means it’s about half the price. Ironic as the Marshal was pretty much a copy of Fender’s Bassman.

Full explanation here, I’ve got teh same rig 😉

ah the classic STW doesn’t get other people thing 😉

That’s reasonable though isn’t it? I’m not ragging on anyone for liking it, I just don’t really understand it beyond the reasons I listed.

you should probably avoid 6 music tomorrow, they will be playing a lot of vinyl there and maybe talking about it too

Thanks for the PSA.

I use Google Play when in my van or out and about and at home if it’s just background music. Ive only recently started to pay for Play as both of my kids wanted to listen to their own music and that’s the best value way for us. I’m lucky that there are still a lot of record shops in Edinburgh so I’ll still buy cheap CD’s. Artists I really love I’ll buy on vinyl, if I’m feeling a bit skint I’ll buy the CD. The streaming services pay so little to the artists I can’t not buy a physical copy of the music I love, doesn’t seem right not too. The point of all this is I can’t really say one sounds better than the other, unless the vinyl is dirty or damaged. But if I put a record on I’m more likely to sit down and really take it in. After listening to the new John Prine album for a while I bought the vinyl version. On first listen I thought I could hear a lot more detail but listening to the digital version I think I just hadn’t been paying enough attention.

On first listen I thought I could hear a lot more detail but listening to the digital version I think I just hadn’t been paying enough attention.

I wonder if perhaps that’s a big part of it.

There’s a world of difference between putting some music on and actually listening to music. Maybe records promote the latter?

I remember circa 2000, I’d just got a new amp and decided to try it out by sticking some headphones on, lying on the floor in a darkened room and playing a CD I’d listened to countless times. I heard a load of new stuff that I’d never noticed before. “Wow,” I thought, “this amp is ace!” But since then I still hear the same bits on subsequent plays, I’d just never really listened before.