Do guitarists still view buying a solid state amp as something best avoided ?

BintyTwanger77

Roland Jazz Chorus is still a great amp. With a decent EQ & boost you can even make the distortion on it sound decent.

bingefeller

I avoid valve and go for low watt SS / modelling amps every time.  I'm only a bedroom warrior so have no need for expensive and loud valve amps. 

menamestom

Having tried the small DV Mark Little Jazz out today, I think there is definitely a place for quality non digital solid state amps.  Different cleans to a valve amp but equally nice.

Trouble with solid state amps are they are usually built as cheap as possible.  Put a well designed quality solid state amp in a nice cab with a nice speaker and you end up with a nice amp. 

JezWynd

I love my humble Vox Pathfinder 15r, so much so I got a second to run in stereo. It's the closest to a valve amp feel I've experienced from a solid state amp, esp with a compressor in front.

p90fool

I tend to buy 1950s technology for the simple but ironic reason that it's relatively future proof.

I have maybe 10 years left of gigging if I'm very lucky, and when I think back to some of the solid state stuff I owned a few short years ago, the idea of even finding a circuit diagram, let alone parts is just a joke.

I do fancy trying an Orange 120 tranny head though, I like the sound of them and want to know if the dynamic feel is usable for me.

Telejester

bingefeller said:

I avoid valve and go for low watt SS / modelling amps every time.  I'm only a bedroom warrior so have no need for expensive and loud valve amps. 

You have no idea just how much logic is in your reply

When I was a regular gigger in a hard rock band my amp for the shows was my mk1 Peavey 5150 head through a 4x12 and what a sound it produced, I kept it in the bedroom and the wife and kids despised it , the fact I could only play it below 1 was the final annoyance.

Blueingreen

Not all guitarists.

My main amp for many years was a hybrid (MusicMan) which I thought sounded better than any valve amp I've played (and back in the day I owned 3 or 4 Marshall amps that I suspect would be very sought after, pricey bits of vintage gear now). Maybe that meant I avoided the valve amp obsession.

Now I've got a ropy back and light weight is essential.  My main amp is a Quilter.  There are some lightweight valve amp options but the likes of a Princeton is not loud enough and a Deluxe Reverb is still a little too heavy.  I looked at options like a Victory V40 head and lightweight cab, but in demos I wasn't convinced they sounded as good as the Quilter, which allows me to have a 100 watt combo weighing 21lbs.

But I guess it's a case of temperament as well - where you are on the spectrum of how much gear matters and is vintage better.  I think the importance of gear is much exaggerated by many guitarists, at least as far as sound goes (playability is a different matter).  And I fundamentally don't really buy the vintage is better thing. 

Bygone_Tones

I picked up an old Carlsbro Marlin a few days ago. It's actually a PA amp but I am quite impressed with it, the reverb is really nice. With a good valve pre-amp in front of it providing the distortion, it would probably sound pretty amazing.

ICBM

Bygone_Tones said:

I picked up an old Carlsbro Marlin a few days ago. It's actually a PA amp but I am quite impressed with it, the reverb is really nice. With a good valve pre-amp in front of it providing the distortion, it would probably sound pretty amazing.

They do. I have one as a backup/general purpose amp as well. With a Mesa V-Twin in front and into a guitar cab it sounds just like a good guitar amp.

markv

Way back before I knew "better" I had a Laney Linebacker 65R. My recollection is that it was pretty good, and better than the Marshall Valvestate I traded it for.

There were some good reviews of the Award Session Blues Baby last year, has anyone tried one?

fendergibson

I always thought valve....and then I got a Tech 21Trademark 10.....which proved otherwise. 

Jimbro66

For clean sounds I see no issue with ss amps but I hear guys who say they want a really clean valve amp and the first thing they do is put a boost in front of it so it's not clean any more. If you do that with a ss amp it usually sounds shite. So for real clean ss is fine.

We use ss in a lot of pedals so why not amps?

Years ago I gigged with a Peavey MX which was a hybrid amp. Boy did that amp have some punch. Like night and day compared to the Bandit that preceded it.

mellowsun

Wish Marshall still made the Valvestate amps. They were great. I played an 8080 in a practice studio recently and it was really inspiring to play.

I'm tempted by the recent Roland JC40 but it is pretty pricey 

Voxman

markv said:

Way back before I knew "better" I had a Laney Linebacker 65R. My recollection is that it was pretty good, and better than the Marshall Valvestate I traded it for.

There were some good reviews of the Award Session Blues Baby last year, has anyone tried one?

Although of course the Marshall Valvestate is a solid state and not a valve amp (it has a 12AX7 in the gain channel to 'warm up' the tone, but its all solid state). 

fendergibson

mellowsun said:

Wish Marshall still made the Valvestate amps. They were great. I played an 8080 in a practice studio recently and it was really inspiring to play.

I'm tempted by the recent Roland JC40 but it is pretty pricey 

I had an 8080, it was great till I realised I couldn't hear myself over our Larry Mullen type drummer. No headroom whatsoever.

If I were gigging now I'd be seriously looking into the micro amp scene, failing that - looking for a Twin....and someone to lift it for me, preferably the drummer 

Voxman

mellowsun said:

Wish Marshall still made the Valvestate amps. They were great. I played an 8080 in a practice studio recently and it was really inspiring to play.

I'm tempted by the recent Roland JC40 but it is pretty pricey 

Very under-rated, came well appointed with a real spring reverb, parallel FX loop with mix control and adjustable for 0dB and -20dB, clean/crunch & OD1/OD2 switches, parallel FX, dedicated EQ on both channels, and a very good Celestion G12T75 speaker.  The Mk1 '80v' 8080 wasn't Marshall's top seller of all time for nothing!  And its incredibly reliable and still my number one back-up amp!   

Danny1969

For me solid state amps are a solution looking for a problem. Nowadays little valve amps are cheap, reliable, easier to fix if they go wrong and nicer sounding than solid state amps to my ears. I have tried other stuff in the 30 years I've been doing this ......... Sessionette 75, Marshall SS pre amp into hi fi amp, Tech 21 Trademark 60, Vox Tonelab SE into Marshall SS power amp .....Vox AD120VT .... I've always come back to valves ...  For me there's no advantage to using something solidstate I'm not sure there is for most people assuming the amps got a master volume. 

In my own experiments I decided if one half of the amp needs to be SS and one half valve then the best results come from having a valve power section rather than a valve pre amp.  Unfortunately that's the expensive part so I can see why amp makers are always trying to do it the other way round

HAL9000

As regards the thread title, no, quite the opposite - I regard valve amps as something best avoided. Especially now that manufacturers are making decent quality SS amps such as the Roland Blues Cubes, Orange Crush Pro series, and the Yamaha THR100.

I'd agree that SS amps have too often been viewed/sold as 'bedroom' amps and built down to a price. However, now that there are a handful of decent quality SS amps I suspect that other manufacturers will jump on that bandwagon.

Admittedly, most of my playing is in the bedroom or at local jam nights, with only the occasional gig, but with SS amps nothing has ever broken, my back isn't suffering, and the bank balance isn't stretched too much.

ICBM

Danny1969 said:

For me solid state amps are a solution looking for a problem. Nowadays little valve amps are cheap, reliable, easier to fix if they go wrong

Less true than it used to be. The problem isn't so much the valves, as the other stuff inside all but the most traditional valve amps. Have a look inside your HT-5... OK, changing SM ICs and resistors isn't impossible, but it's certainly harder than on an old-school solid-state amp with through-hole discrete transistors and resistors.

I also just prefer the tone of most solid-state amps to most small valve amps. Not necessarily the overdrive sound, but I usually find it easier to fix that than the over-compressed mid of so many small valve amps.

Bygone_Tones

ICBM said:

Bygone_Tones said:

I picked up an old Carlsbro Marlin a few days ago. It's actually a PA amp but I am quite impressed with it, the reverb is really nice. With a good valve pre-amp in front of it providing the distortion, it would probably sound pretty amazing.

They do. I have one as a backup/general purpose amp as well. With a Mesa V-Twin in front and into a guitar cab it sounds just like a good guitar amp.

Good to know. Although I might have to splash out on a mesa v-twin now! Out of interest do you know what the power output is on them? Cant find much info on them. Is it 120w? and do you know if the reverb tank is the same as the one found on the standalone 'carlsbro reverb unit'?

 I also picked up a carlsbro cobra head too, it is not a "cobra 90" model. It is basically the same but smaller in size and has no reverb. Cant even find a pic of one the same as mine on google, never mind the spec.

Any info appreciated.