What advantages do tubes offer over transistors in effects pedals?
The short answer is, peace of mind. Tubes offer clarity, richness and purity of tone that simply cannot be attained with solid-state silicon or germanium technologies such as transistors, FETs, opamps and even the latest digital modelling technologies. To my ear, transistors and FETs often sound overbright, clinical and even brittle sounding. They are also susceptible to overload and clip in a harsh and unpleasant way splattering the audioband with unrelated harmonic content. With careful design these effects can be minimized, however tubes are inherently linear, have greater headroom and softclip. They’re the right tool for the job of audio signal processing. It’s interesting to note that hthe first use for transistors was in the mass manufacture of portable radios. The sound quality of these was not exactly audiophile. The operational amplifer was originally designed for analog computation. True bypass is no longer an issue because our pedals do not contain any opamp or transistor bu
