What is the easiest way to get tube sound at a good price?
• Obtain an old piece of tube gear, perhaps intended for another purpose, like mono hifi, at no or low cost. Modify this to duplicate to a certain extent the circuit of an existing amplifier. Tinker to your heart’s content. There is a document on exactly this at http://www.wwu.edu/~n9343176/docs/old2new.html The document goes into excellent detail on the in’s and out’s of building from old tube gear and the possible and useful variations of which stages with how much gain go where in the amp. • Build a tube preamp from scratch, and use this to drive another larger amplifier which does not necessarily have to be tube based. I have designed things like this, so have others. Good tube sound, and inexpensive. Really convincing tube distortion, especially if you add some lowpass filtering to simulate the high frequency cutoff of guitar speakers. This is what the Hughes and Kettner Blues Master and Cream Machine tube preamps did (they’ve been discontinued). These were entire tube amplifiers
