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Tube Watts vs. Solid State Watts, Conversion?

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#41
I think realiastically tube amp watt ratings are what we are talking about. Not tube watts. Of course a watt is a watt. :rollno:
However a tube amp rated for 200 watts will bury a solid state head rated for 200 watts. Even if it has a tube preamp which compresses and adds even/odd harmonics.
Tubes are just damn louder.
It isnt as if you have to run an SVT or a Mesa Bass 400 into overdrive to be obnoxiously loud.
My take is this. Most solid state amps need to be run well under clipping to sound good. Tube amps can be run much closer to the edge of clipping before you hear it. So you get all of your watts!
so lets say you have a solid state amp thats 200 watts. To aviod the harsh solidstate clipping you play 3db under the clip point. This means you are "throwing-away" almost half the power. Whereas the tube amps gentler clipping on the peaks allows you to play all the way up to full watts without sounding clipped.
Of course some solidstate heads (GK 400RB?) dont sound too bad when clipped.
 
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#43
Colonel129 said:
Huh, I don't see anywhere that I snapped at one person for bringing up the fact this is a topic that has been done before. Actually, I did criticize the fact only a few ppl address the part of my question that was seldomly addressed. So either find something better to do than try and police politeness, or just get over yourself in general. I asked a question b/c I wanted to hear an answer. Last time I checked, that's the point of a forum.

Drop the dramatics.
Click to expand...

I think the issue is that it's not a complete question... it didn't describe fully a choice between 2 products.. a problem you're trying to solve etc.

add that there are pages of other discussions.

Many of us have owned both.. they're different beasts.. have different benefits and uses.

It's not good form to go after the folks trying to help you --
 
#45
Hmmm.. i dont buy the "no difference, a watt is a watt" argument at all when it comes to volume... A watt is a watt when it comes to electrical compatability, but tubes DEVASTATE!!!

Look at my profile to see the list of amps ive had. 450 watt SS, 575 watt SS, 1100 watt SS!!!... NONE OF EM (repeat...) NONE OF EM were as loud when pushed to their peaks as my 100 watt V4B is on 5 or 6, or my 300 pro and SVT were on 3! ( i did have a 750 watt Big Block, and that kinda hung with the tube amps for volume... but couldnt match em on soul!)

This isnt a matter of perception... its a matter of knocking things off my wall and breaking plaster!
 
#47
Bass_Pounder said:
And you know that any 810 on the market is "more powerful" than the V 412 how ?

What are cab voicings ?, what are their sensitivity ratings ?

You can't just look at a cab rated for "X" watts and automatically say it is a more powerful cab because it's rated higher or has more speakers.

Also, based on how you are saying it, I am assuming that it was amps and cabs that you were allowed to use as either part of a show backline, or a tryout in a music store. If so, that tells me you did not know enough about the particular head and cab combo, or spend any appreciable time with the setup to really know it's capabilities.
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The V4's 412 pretty much has none of that sophisticated info...so even if I wanted to look it up I can't. I wasn't playing generic cabs...but suffice to say I was playing through a LOT of different ones (too many to go into detail listing). Expecting me to get to know every setup I come across in such a way that I know their full capabilities is an investment of my time in a useless manner. I played a bunch of different setups, and none of them even came close to the one I have now. Period. If an amp head doesn't sound "loud enough" to my ears (regardless of the cab), then it isn't worth my time. Why would I go thru all the trouble to hook a head up to a bunch of different cabs if it never "wowed" me in the first place? An 800W SS amp plugged into ANY 810 should be at least on the level with the V4 if not blowing it out of the water, but in my personal experience that hasn't been the case. It would really shock me if the V4's 412 (mine is over 40 years old!) would be better at putting out sound then most modern 810s on the market.
 
#48
To compare the position of the "volume" knob is to be poorly informed. It is the designers decision as to how fast any amp reaches its "rated" power by "volume" knob position. That will not even touch on the subject of stage gain stucture/how much signal is required to fill the stages prior to the actual output section. Your blowing smoke :)
 
#49
B-string said:
To compare the position of the "volume" knob is to be poorly informed. It is the designers decision as to how fast any amp reaches its "rated" power by "volume" knob position. That will not even touch on the subject of stage gain stucture/how much signal is required to fill the stages prior to the actual output section. Your blowing smoke :)
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And..............I would venture a guess that anyone making the tubes are "X" amount louder than SS NEVER properly used a compressor with the SS head.

It's already been discussed to death the fact that tubes have natural compression that aid in getting higher output without clipping/distortion.
 
#50
The following are generalities.

The reason a tube amp can compress by up to 6 dB and get away with it is, its distortion characteristics when driven into clipping are relatively benign to the ear. So by the time a tube amp sounds bad, the average SPL (which is more important to perceived loudness than the peak SPL) could be 6 dB louder than the point at which a comparably-rated solid state amp starts to sound bad.

A tube amp generates mostly low-order, even-order harmonics until it is driven into hard clipping. I'm aware of a controlled listening test in which 30% (!) second harmonic distortion was found to be statistically inaudible. In contrast, very small amounts of high, odd-order distortion are quite audible and objectionable, and a solid state amp will usually produce such distortion relatively early during the onset of clipping.

So it is not that tube watts are actually louder or more powerful; rather, it is that tube clipping is less audible, allowing a higher average SPL before clipping becomes objectionable. There are techniques that a solid state amplifier designer can use to emulate the clipping behavior of tubes, but that's out of my league.
 
#52
Calaverasgrande said:
Most solid state amps need to be run well under clipping to sound good. Tube amps can be run much closer to the edge of clipping before you hear it. So you get all of your watts!
so lets say you have a solid state amp thats 200 watts. To aviod the harsh solidstate clipping you play 3db under the clip point. This means you are "throwing-away" almost half the power. Whereas the tube amps gentler clipping on the peaks allows you to play all the way up to full watts without sounding clipped.
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No. With a typical solid state amp, the wattage rating they are given is based on the point at which they start to clip. Not 3 dB before the clipping point, not "throwing away half your wattage". An amp that is rated 200 W will put out 200 W before clipping (at the test frequency, under test parameters). When you get "more power" out of a tube amp, it is partly because you have, at that point, made it put out far more than its rated wattage. Up to twice as much.

And one preamp tube clipping/compressing is nothing compared to a bank of power tubes and the output transformer. Trying to equate one or two preamp tubes with the whole compression and clipping reaction of an all-tube amp misses the boat by far.
 
#54
bongomania said:
No. With a typical solid state amp, the wattage rating they are given is based on the point at which they start to clip. Not 3 dB before the clipping point, not "throwing away half your wattage". An amp that is rated 200 W will put out 200 W before clipping (at the test frequency, under test parameters). When you get "more power" out of a tube amp, it is partly because you have, at that point, made it put out far more than its rated wattage. Up to twice as much.
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I wasnt saying that. How about if you rate both a tube amp and a solid state amp the same way. Lets say, how many watts they will output into the same load at 3% distortion.
You will be able to play that tube amp right up to the edge of distortion without it sounding distorted at all. When you do clip the peaks it doesnt sound objectionable. For the solidstate amp
(in actual use) you will play under the clipping point. Usually by a margin of a few db in order to avoid clipping. Trying to maintain a margin of 1db is difficult while playing bass. Heck I thought a 3db margin was being generous. I would prefer to play with 4-6db of headroom on a bass amp at least.
When I refer to peaks I am not talking about dynamics, playing from soft to loud. I am talking about the transient at the leading edge of the note. the sharp attacking part of the note. These will eat up the headroom of an amp pretty well.
That all aside, there is more to amplifiaction than watts and ohms. There is such things as damping. How well the tube amp controls the speaker. How the speaker motor interacts with the output of the amp. Tube amps generally have higher output impedances, lower negative feed back and lower damping factors. these also affect how loud an amp sounds.
 
#55
TortillaChip520 said:
I'm just trying to answer your question.
Click to expand...

Its funny how this works on forums.
If you start a new thread, folks point you to an old thread and say "go read that". UTSF!
If you dig up an old thread and post to it you are accused of resurrecting an old thread.
Attack of the zombie thread!
How about everybody play nice. Its only the damn internet. Now I am gonna go play my bass at the studio through my tube amp. :bassist:
 
#57
What I love is the fact that I've read many many many of these threads, and the vast majority of them are LOADED with misinformation, insults (typically against the OP), and justifications of the insults. I had the same question when starting out, and I DID read tons of threads -- more than even somebody listed here -- and found lots of useless crack-jabber and a fair dose of massive-technical-overkill for what could be a really simple topic.

Here it took about 50 posts before I saw the kind of info I THINK the OP would benefit from.

So, to the OP: I always heard it 3:1, and when I played my SWR 300w against an Ampeg V4B (100w), I found the two to be fairly competitive, so I kept 3:1 as my quick and dirty reference.

The way I heard the matter described that helped was this (and you can see this info in some of the latest posts in this thread): Amp watt ratings mean "watts before breaking up." SS amps break up near their max power, but sound like crap when they break up. Tube amps break up a lot earlier, but they sound really good for a lot of that range of breaking up. So tube amps end up with lower watt ratings, but seem to have a lot more power -- but that's only if you make the mistaken assumption that the "watt" means "maximum absolute power."

So, making up some numbers: my SWR 300 and Ampeg V4B might both actually have an actual maximum capability of 350 watts (before they blow up), and probably could be rated as 350watts. But once the SWR starts putting out 300 watts, it starts to sound awful, so anything after that is unusable. The Ampeg, meanwhile, starts to break up at 100watts, but sounds fantastic, so you keep cranking it. By the time it reaches a dangerous point, it's also putting out 300 watts -- glorious tubey growly whatever-the-F, and because of things folks explained earlier, it might even sound louder still than the SWR, but the key point is that the 100 watt Ampeg is keeping up quite nicely with the 300 watt SWR. So the reality is that this is all a matter of terminology (ratings) that are not explained to consumers in any meaningful way, unless you find a salesman who kindly boils it down to a simple practical (albeit not scientifically accurate) principle like "Tube watts are 3x louder than SS watts."

At the end of the day a newbie needs to know how to compare these amps if s/he's gonna make an informed purchase. Knowing how to compare SS amps to tube amps is a practical necessity, and delving into the finer points of compression and harmonics has its place, but so to does a simple discussion of practical principles -- and those are typically hard to find just by using the search feature.

If people keep asking the same question, it often means nobody has done a good job of ANSWERING it...

ltt
 
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#58
A great similar topic is (or was) AMD's processor ratings...they'd sell processors as 2100s, but people would freak out when they clocked the procs at only 1700mhz...same fights, same kinds of thread evolutions...ah the homogeneity of the internet...
 
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