CliffC8488

Nice steaming pile of PayPal BS right there.

Originally posted by PhilBelanger It may but I haven't seen it yet. In all the class A/B amps circuits I've seen, each side of phase inverter circuit are not matched by design (different anode resistor values) , so putting a matched tube in there won't do much the way I see it. At least not something you can hear IMHO. The resistors are not matched to help the balance actually. That said, an unbalanced PI will add even harmonics since as the power stage clips one side will go into saturation first. Can you hear it? Maybe, maybe not. I've done extensive double-blind tests regarding the ratio of harmonics and most people can't hear the difference until the ratio becomes very great. For example, Pods etc. have basically no even harmonics to which I attribute the consensus that some people find them "fizzy". A real amp on the other hand will have a good balance of both. Preamp distortion also tends to have lots of even harmonics since preamp tubes are never biased at 50% and sometimes even around 90% (i.e. JCM800 second stage). If your amp is mostly preamp distortion then the PI will have little effect on the tone as the power amp isn't distorting much. An old Plexi or Vox, however, relies on power amp breakup and the PI can have some (not much though) effect on the tone. HOWEVER, it's not neccessarily a good thing that the PI is balanced. A little bit of unbalance can actually be more pleasing to some people. (BTW, the Axe-Fx actually models the unbalance of the power amp. We do what we call "harmonic content matching" which matches the model response to an actual amp up to the 13th harmonic). CC

The really sad thing is that people like the OP make up the majority nowadays (or so the election results seem to indicate). CC