Re: Guitar Amp Modelers
@ Bob... thanks for the kind words about Peavey amps but that was kind of like the family business so they had to get that right. As the legend goes, young Hartley wanted to play guitar in bands and he was able to build his own amps for himself and his bandmates, after getting kicked out of the second band that he outfitted with amps, he decided to skip ahead to the end game and just build amps for sale.
I shared lab/office space with peavey guitar amp design engineers a few decades ago and one important observation, they were also active players in local bands. So they knew how the amps were supposed to sound. I recall how painful it was to listen to the previous bass amp engineer who didn't play, wank on the amp he was working on... How can you design an amp if you don't play? It's a musical instrument, or part of one.
I do not consider myself qualified to judge how good the standard amps are/were, if the lads could make Eddie Van Halen and many other professionals happy, that's good enough for me. My specific comment was about the trans-tube series that was new back when I was working there (decades ago) and they were a dedicated tube amp mimic, that in my judgement did not completely replicate a tube amp, but was able to convincingly recreate a number of the euphonious tube amp sound characteristics. (YMMV).
One thing to remember about this discussion I do not pretend that these (new modelers) are exactly like tube amps, they only need to sound like a tube amp playing though a PA system (for this thread). I have had many discussions with the lead amp design engineers and have a passing awareness of the many obscure variables involved in characterizing a tube amp path (+transducer sound + box sound + etc).
So enjoy your old iron when you can, and it is just progress that modern modeling technology is getting better.
JR
