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October 16th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Ron/Phil – Tubes: Absolutely agree. One interesting "tube" phenomenon is that solid state guitar/music amplifiers became the rage for a Very Brief period twenty years ago. They were harsh, dreadful things. All decent amplifiers are not only tube, but the tubes have been improved upon, there are dozens of aftermarket high quality tube makers, Dumble, Mesa Boogie and many others make superb tube amplifiers — in short, the last twenty years or so have seen modern manufacturing methods and electronics applied to analog technology, and the result is that custom modded amps costing many thousands are now within the price range of the average buyer, and the digital stuff occupies only the lowest and cheapest stratum of instrument amplification. It wouldn’t surprise me to see music playback technology advance "back to the future" in a comprehensive way at some point. "Records" really are delicate pains in the butt, and I’ll bet that can be remedied while retaining the continuous character of an analog signal with contemporary equipment, rather than the discontinuous "bits and bytes" approach.
In the same vein, the resonance and tone on selected ’59 to ’62 Fender Stratocaster, and some Gibsons of similar vintage [Jimmy Page’s Les Paul Standard, e.g.] have never been improved upon. I asked a luthier in Spain why this should be so. He answered that wood used to be very uneven in quality, but has now been considerably homogenized. That means cheap guitars are much better than the old "cheap guitars" ever were, because the dispersion in wood quality has been much reduced, but, at the same time, the chance of getting a truly exceptional piece of wood has been proportionately decreased.
I have a half-dozen old Strats, have played quite a few more, and many of them are indistinguishable from contemporary guitars, but a few others absolutely sing, and command prices an order of magnitude greater than anything made today. My ’59 Strat with its "slab" rosewood fretboard is just a wonder of nature; the pickups in those days were hand-wound, another imprecise "analog" process with a quite random number of wraps at times, and luck of the draw could produce perfectly ordinary instruments or the occasional Stradivarius.