Admiral Regent/C322C2 Score!

[Electronic M]

There are 2 schools of tube amp design that depend on the customer: HiFi source listener, or musician.

The HiFi listener wants the minimum distortion achievable when playing back their LPs, etc.

The musician wants lots of distortion, but very specific types, tuned so that the amp becomes an extension of the instrument they intend to play through it.

Ever wonder why most electric guitar (especially in rock music) sounds nothing like acoustic?....The amp's distortion is the answer. Many electric guitars sound like an acoustic if not passed through an amp that imparts the correct distortion.

The pre-amp stages of many guitar amps are purposely designed to go into clipping at higher settings of their sub volume control...That clipping adds desirable characteristics to the sound...The output stage clipping also has some bearing on the sound (those amps outputs are often also intentionally driven to clipping), and the stiffness of the power supply regulation/filtering will affect that. In some pre-amp stages having leaky paper caps is key to achieving the distortion wanted: the caps will act like diodes above a certain voltage threshold and change the wave shape of the signal passed.

Most musicians are, when it comes to electronics, completely non-technical people (and some of their tastes are based more on experience/superstition than science), but if you take an amp that has "the sound" they want and analyze how it changes the waveform of the signal it is passing and how the bad caps in it affect that, then it is possible to build modern amps with "the sound" and reliable parts....I know someone who does that type of work.

Sorry to go OT.